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WHAT SHALL I 
BELIEVE 



ADDRESSES BY THE 
FACULTY of the AUBURN 
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 



PHILADELPHIA 

THE PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION 

1908 



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Copyright, 1908, by the Trustees of 

The Presbyterian Board of Publication and 

Sabbath-School Work 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION ,. . . . xi 

CHAPTER I. 

CONCERNING BELIEF. By Rev. Allen Macy 
Dulles, D.D., Professor of Theism and Apolo- 
getics 1 

Don Quixote as representing current notions. — 
Popular definitions. — " Pistis " in the New Testa- 
ment. — Faith defined. — Evidence necessary to faith. 
— Faith helps the soul to advance into unseen. — 
Seeking faith is not having faith. — Tennyson in 
error. — Belief coextensive with truth. — Knowledge 
and belief. — Willingness to believe is not belief. — 
Demonstration not possible. — Pragmatism. — Faith 
proportionate to evidence. — Doubt destructive of 
faith. — Saying " I believe/' is not believing. — In- 
tellectual honesty. — What is meant by evidence or 
proof. — Faith not " an assumption for moral gain." 
— Hope confused with faith. — How to evade a creed. 
— The will and belief. — The moral element. — Belief 
beset by doubts. — The victory of faith. 

CHAPTER II. 

CONCERNING GOD. By Rev. Willis Judson 
Beecher, D.D., Professor of the Hebrew Lan- 
guage and Literature 31 

Introduction. Old-fashioned Theism. 
I. Theistic doctrine includes " the law of the per- 
sistence of energy." — The theist versus the 
agnostic scientist. — Nehemiah and Herbert 
Spencer. — The catechism and current science. — 
Theism affirms that persisting energy is not 
all. 

iii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

II. It includes the doctrine of God as immanent. 
— Different conceptions of divine immanency. — 
The universe as living force. — Manifesting 
everywhere intelligence and purpose. — Nehe- 
miah's view. — One of the commonplaces of 
theology. — Its place in the inferior religions. 
— Tennyson's " Higher Pantheism." 
III. And the doctrine of God as transcendent. — 
Not merely omnipresent Being, but self-reveal- 
ing. — One who cares, and who approves or 
disapproves. — Especially self-revealing in Israel 
and Christ and the Scriptures. — Anthropomor- 
phic expressions for transcendence. — No doc- 
trine of an " absentee God." — Inadequate ideas, 
due to neglect. — Christ's conception of our 
Father in heaven. 

CHAPTER III. 

CONCERNING JESUS, CHRIST. By Rev. James 

Stevenson Riggs, D.D., Taylor, Seymour and 

Ivison Professor of Biblical Criticism ... 55 

Introduction. Jesus is not satisfied with a merely 

intellectual judgment regarding Himself. — He is 

the Christ both of history and of experience and 

can never be completely considered except under 

both aspects. 

I. The Christ of History: 

(a) The facts of the gospels are necessary 

to the existence of Christianity. 

(b) The Church is in no danger of losing any 

of these facts. 

(c) The historical Christ is now more clear- 

ly seen than ever before. 
II. The Christ of Experience. The Spiritual Im- 
port of Christ: 

(a) He is to us the revelation of the char- 

acter of God. 

(b) He is to us the way and means of God's 

forgiveness. 

(c) He is the motive power of the Christian 

life. 

(d) He is the surety of our final and com- 

plete redemption. 
iv 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER IV. 

PAGE 

CONCERNING THE BIBLE. By Rev. George Black 
Stewart, D.D., LL.D., President, Professor of 

Practical Theology 79 

I. Belief about the Bible is affected by two in- 
fluences: (a) By our early education, (b) By 
our intellectual and religious environment. — 
These influences are always active, either in 
harmony or opposition. — The conflict between 
our early training and our own experience 
starts most of the interesting questions about 
the Bible. — We can have a doctrine of the 
Bible which allows us to retain both our in- 
tellectual integrity and our reverence for the 
Scripture in the presence of modern thought. 
II. Belief in the Bible is secondary to belief in 
God. — Zeal for the Bible leads some to reverse 
this order, to the confusion of thought and the 
discredit of the Book. — Man's chief duty is to 
get right with God, not with a book. 

III. Belief in the Bible recognizes its variety and 
its unity. — The Bible is not a book but a li- 
brary. — The variety is in form and content, 
the unity is of the spirit. — The great dominant 
ideas are the same although expressed variously 
and with progressive clearness.— This unity is 
only adequately explained by the activity of 
the Spirit of God. 

IV. Belief that the Bible is essentially a religious 
book. — Its historical and other matter are not 
its chief concern, nor final in determining its 
value for us. — Whether a certain part is his- 
tory or myth, or history or story, does not 
affect the chief question about the Book. — 
Does the Bible deal with spiritual realities and 
that in a trustworthy manner, is the chief 
question. — It solves man's fundamental reli- 
gious problem. — Its center and charm is Jesus 
Christ. — He is its principal credential and 
without Him it would lose its place. — Because 
of its relation to Him it is a revelation, as 
well as a record of revelations. — Jesus Christ 
carries the Book to the preeminence that is 
His, and it will abide there as long as He does. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE. 

V. Belief that the Bible is a creative force. — The 
Old, and especially the New, Testament have 
had great constructive influence in the world. 
— This influence is not due to its historical or 
literary quality, but to its unique spiritual 
quality as a word of life. 

VI. It is the Book of our Religion. — Christianity 
is not the religion of a book, but a religion 
with a book. — It finds men and thus shows 
itself to be a veritable candle of the Lord. — 
Practically, even for the stiffest inspirationist, 
only those parts are inspired which are profit- 
able. 

Conclusion. Our belief in the Bible leads us to 
exhort men to repentance toward God and 
faith in Jesus Christ. — Our belief in the Bible 
leads us to rejoice in the most critical study 
of it. — It is a book of light and bears the test 
of the light. 

CHAPTER V. 

CONCERNING MAN. By Rev. Allen Macy Dulles, 

D.D., Professor of Theism and Apologetics . . 99 
Man a mystery and a problem to himself. — The 
utterances of true science are welcome. — Evolution 
places man at or near the goal. — Other animals 
superior to man physically. — The brain does not 
think. — Not his body but reason distinguishes man. 
— Philosophy exalts man. Man's marvelous perform- 
ances. — Man a child of God. — Man capable of being 
religious. — Man by nature akin to God. — Tennyson, 
Goethe, Pascal. — Mankind presents frightful con- 
trasts. — Man's self-debasement. — What is the " nat- 
ural " man. — Adam. — The Adamic nature. — Sin as 
" natural " to man. — The Fall, a misuse of power. 
— Man has no will, he wills, — The flesh or sarx. — 
The conflict of approbation and conduct. — Spiritual 
enslavement. — Salvation a spiritual freedom. 

CHAPTER VI. 

CONCERNING SALVATION. By Rev. Harry Lath- 
rop Reed, A.B., Assistant Professor in New 

Testament Greek 127 

The cry for mercy, a testimony to the universal 
yi 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

consciousness of sin and need of a saviour. — The 
world religions have therefore all been religions of 
Salvation, offering a way of Salvation. — One reli- 
gion has proved itself the religion by offering the 
Way. — The various and varied conceptions of Sal- 
vation and the Way which are found in the New 
Testament. — Their agreement that Salvation is de- 
liverance; from the past, in the present, and for the 
future. 
I. From the past — Forgiveness. — Forgiveness in 
the life of Jesus: He forgave; He spoke of 
forgiveness as a reality; He illustrated for- 
giveness; He interpreted sin and forgiveness 
in terms of personal pronouns; He proved 
forgiveness possible, by proving God a Father; 
He made forgiveness possible by the cross. 
II. In the present — a power and a life. — A power 
to overcome the power of sin, and a life to live, 
through a vital union with Christ. — The char- 
acteristics of that life. — Godward — Manward — 
Saved to serve. 
III. For the future — an inheritance, reserved, and 
yet to be revealed. 

CHAPTER VII. 

CONCERNING THE CHURCH. By Rev. Edward 
Waite Miller, D.D., Hyde Professor of Ec- 
clesiastical History and Church Polity . . .151 
Belief in the Church an essential article of Chris- 
tian faith. — The Church an imposing historical 
institution. — Meaning of Ecclesia in the New Testa- 
ment. — Christ's use of the word. — The separation 
of the Christian from the Jewish Ecclesia. — The 
figures under which Paul represents the Church. — 
The three distinctive features of the Apostolic 
Church: (a) Democracy in government; (b) Va- 
riety in external features; (c) Unity of spirit. — 
The unity of the Church a fact for faith. — The 
unity of the Church a " unity of the Spirit." — The 
external uniformity of the Catholic Church in the 
Empire. — The Church divided into Greek and Ro- 
man. — The rise of the Protestant churches. — The 
numerous churches represent the Church. — The 
Church- as adequate authority. — The relation of 
Church and Kingdom. — The Church as servant of 
Christ. 

vii 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER VIII. 

PAGE 

CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION. By Rev. 
James Stevenson Riggs, D.D., Taylor, Sey- 
mour and Ivison Professor of Biblical Criti- 
cism 183 

Introduction. The method of attack in our day is 
the distinction between " The Easter Message " 
( the story of the empty grave ) and " The Easter 
Faith" (the spiritual import of the Resurrec- 
tion) and the rejection of the Easter Message. 
I. The Easter Message — Christ actually, phys- 
ically rose from the grave. 

(a) The Scripture evidence for this fact. 

(b) The difficulty of accounting for the fact 

by any form of " vision " theory. 

(c) The necessity of the fact to the faith of 

the church. 
II. The Easter Faith — Christ having risen from 
the dead lives forevermore. — The significance 
of this fact to the church is: 

(a) That it gives validity to the life and 

death of Jesus : 

1 In verifying His own predictions. 

2 In making good His declaration 

that " life " shall triumph over 
death for all believers. 

3 In opening the way for the vital 

realization of the forgiveness 
of sin. 

(b) That it gives the promise and pledge of 

the redemption of our complete per- 
sonality. 

1 Personality in the Bible includes 

body with soul. 

2 Christ's resurrection is typical of 

our bodily resurrection 

( 1 ) The Resurrection scenes in 

the gospels have a two- 
fold significance. 

(2) It is not the body which 

we put into the grave 
which shall rise. 

(3) The spiritual body a mys- 

tery but a certainty. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX. 

PAGE 

CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE. By Arthur 
Stephen Hoyt, D.D., Bellamy and Edwards 
Professor of Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral 

Theology 203 

I. The Almost Universal Faith in a Future Life. 

(a) It marked the childhood of the race. — 

It marks the childhood of each man. 
— It is hard for a child to believe in 
death. 

(b) The great thinkers have believed in a 

future life. — Testimony of philosophers 
and poets. 

(c) However crude and dim, the faith has 

been seen in all ages and lands. 
II. Whence Comes the Wide-spread Faith in a 
Future Life? 

(a) Nature gives suggestions of the future. 
— Science has nothing against the 
hope: the doctrine of evolution log- 
ically implies it. 
(b) The experience of man gives the strong- 
est suggestion. — If God is just, true, 
good, there must be a future life. — 
Human love is stronger than death, 
(c) This the prophecy of immortality, the 
presumptive argument. — The need of 
a surer word. 

III. The Teaching of the Bible. 

(a) The Old Testament largely silent. — 

Trains the spiritual life. — Out of the 
higher life of men gleams the hope. 

(b) Christ makes the hope sure by mani- 

festing and giving eternal life and by 
proving its power in His resurrection. 

IV. Christ's Revelation of the Future Life. 

(a) Glimpses of its fullness and blessedness. 

— His significant silence. — The future 
involved in His life. 

(b) The reverse of the picture. — The shadow 

on the wicked. — The penalty of sin is 
sin. 
V. The Influence on the Present of Faith in the 
Future Life. 



IX 



INTRODUCTION 

Religion is not merely an affair of the 
feelings. Every religion has its articles of 
belief, as essential to it as is the material 
body to man's life. 

Many preachers of our Christian churches 
fail to realize how welcome by their audiences 
is a clear presentation of some solid truth. 
The notion that congregations do not want 
doctrinal preaching means no more than that 
they do not want ill-digested matter, nor doc- 
trines which transcend the region of prac- 
tical thought. 

The addresses herewith presented to the 
reading public were presented to hearers in 
the Second Presbyterian Church in Auburn, 
N. Y., in the year 1907. The audiences 
which listened to them indicated that they 
met a need and a desire. The reader is 
asked to have in mind that the addresses 
were prepared for hearers, rather than 
readers. Each is, of course, independent of 
every other, and it is quite possible that 
slight variations may appear where they 
xi 



INTRODUCTION 

touch any common matter, and possibly no 
one address presents the opinion of all. 
These sermons are not to be understood as 
presenting collectively a system of theology. 
Nor are they separate treatises on the sub- 
ject handled. They were and are merely 
popular treatments of important matters 
concerning which some Christians may be 
asking: What Shall I Believe? 

A. M. D. 
Auburn, N. Y. 
January 31, 1908. 



xn 



CONCERNING BELIEF 



WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

CONCERNING BELIEF 

BY ALLEN MACY DULLES 

One of the most amusing incidents in the 
story of Don Quixote is that which occurs be- 
tween this hero and the merchants whom he 
meets on the public road. He rushes toward 
them and summons all the world to conflict, 
so far as the whole world does not admit that 
there is no more beautiful woman in the world 
than the Queen of La Mancha, the incompar- 
able Dulcinea of Toboso. "When the mer- 
chants, somewhat surprised at the sudden 
summons, desired to see a picture of this 
beautiful lady before offering their compli- 
ments, Don Quixote replies: "If I show her 
to you, what value then would there be in a 
confession of a truth of which you have such 
clear and convincing proof? What I demand 
is exactly this : that you shall, without seeing, 
believe, confess, swear by, and fight for this 
lady. If you will not do it, then prepare for 

1 



2 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

battle. Come here, you proud and cursed 
rascals." 

There is current in high quarters to-day, a 
notion of belief which is the counterpart of 
that demanded by the famous Don. 

Belief, or faith, is defined as the acceptance 
as true of that which we have no means of 
knowing whether it is true or not ; the value 
and virtue of faith is that its object is un- 
known, even unknowable. Faith, or belief, 
is man's attitude or relation to the unknown, 
the uncertain, the unproved and unprovable. 

Professor Santayana, of Harvard, says : 

"Religion must withdraw its pretension to 
be dealing with matters of fact. * ' 

Faith, in popular language, accepts some- 
thing as true which is not known to be true. 
Locke says that "Faith is the assent to any 
proposition as true, of whose truth we have 
no certain knowledge. ' ' Hamilton says : ' ' We 
know on reason, and we believe on author- 
ity." Quite similar are the definitions in the 
"Century," and some other dictionaries. 

Without dispute, these definitions may cor- 
respond to the "popular" use of the word 
"belief," but certainly they are misconcep- 
tions of what belief or faith is, in the Chris- 
tian Religion. Of course, there is no law 
which we can call to our assistance to secure 



CONCERNING BELIEF 6 

the use of any word, in only one sense, with 
only one significance. However desirable for 
thought it is that a word be like a coin, 
stamped and with only one value, yet no word 
is this in a living language. 

Therefore we cannot deny either the right 
or possibility of using the word belief as a 
synonym for guess, or conjecture, a supposi- 
tion, or mental venture and the like. 

But, we have a right to inquire in what 
sense anyone uses this word, and a right to 
require that he use it consistently and with 
reasonable limitation of significance. What 
any writer means by faith or belief must be 
learned from the meaning which the whole 
text or context makes evident. 

While, therefore, we cannot hinder any man 
from using belief as expressing a state of 
doubt, and faith as characterized by an un- 
certainty and questionableness, yet we have 
a right to distinguish this use from that which 
is meant by the New Testament "pistis," and 
what, therefore, the words "belief" and 
"faith" which translate it, should mean in 
the Christian Eeligion. 

As Shailer Mathews says (Church and 
the Changing Order), faith deals with facts. 
He quotes Paul's words: "If Christ be not 
raised, your faith is vain." 



4: WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

The substance of the word "pistis" is per- 
suasion. It is a persuasion that something is 
fact, that some one is trustworthy, true. 
Hundreds of times this root is so used in the 
New Testament. 

"Persuading the things concerning the 
kingdom." "We persuade men," says Paul. 
That was his mission, to persuade men to be- 
lieve in Jesus as the Christ, and in the 
passive sense, we have "to be persuaded," 
"to trust in," "have confidence in." 
"Being confident, persuaded, of this one 
thing. " " Having this confidence, " "no con- 
dence in the flesh," neither will they be per- 
suaded, though one rose from the dead." 
And so it means obedience which is the mani- 
festation of this persuaded state. "Who did 
hinder you that ye should not obey the 
truth?" 

Thus we can deduce a definition of what 
belief or faith means from the New Testa- 
ment. 

It is a persuasion based upon evidence as 
its cause, which has self-commitment to that 
which is believed as its result; or, belief is 
the mental, emotional, volitional response 
which man makes to evidence concerning 
truth and reality. 
, That which is believed is true, real, fact. 



CONCERNING BELIEF 

It is belie red and trusted in because of ra- 
tional grounds or evidence. This belief is 
manifest in self-commitment, or trust. That 
which characterizes belief is that it is a per- 
suasion in which man's total nature is in- 
volved, always including the will and the af- 
fections, as well as the intellect. But, as no 
psychology can separate or isolate these, no 
one of these is lacking in belief. If there is 
ever an apparent absence of the persuasion 
of the intellect it is only an appearance, or 
else we cannot call the persuasion faith or 
belief. 

As an intellectual persuasion, we may 
somewhat anticipatorily say, there is in be- 
lief also a consciousness that one is or has 
been persuaded. It is this that separates it 
in some perceptible degree from knowledge 
which psychologically lays emphasis on the 
resulting certainty rather than on the pro- 
cess of persuasion, or the fact that the assur- 
ance is a result. It is, however, we at once 
say, not true to linguistic custom, to deny 
that belief names the certainty of the mind. 
I believe that Julius Caesar entered Britain. 
I believe that Kingston was shaken by an 
earthquake. I believe that the forces of 
nature operate in accord with one another. 
I believe that the law of gravitation operates 



O WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

on the moon, as well as on the earth. I be- 
lieve that behind and beneath and within all 
forces is the will of God. I am persuaded 
that these are facts. I believe these are true. 
These ideas have the equivalent, the co- 
efficient, of reality for me. 

My belief is my confidence, my assurance, 
my certainty. That belief is extended and 
names further the valuation which is put on 
what is known, does not diminish the fact 
that at the basis of faith is always that which 
is known, through experience or testimony, 
or some other way. 

Faith or belief names that soul power 
which aroused, guided and controlled by 
facts of the reason and evidence, advances 
from the past into the future; from the 
already experienced, to that which lies be- 
yond. 

As the tree grows upward, by means of its 
roots, so does faith grow upward, rooted in 
the truth. We are not for a moment re- 
stricting this power, this faith, to prescribed, 
sense-defined limits. As a soul-power, it is 
alive and grows and stretches beyond its past 
self. It roots in evidence, but grasps after 
what is beyond. 

By belief or faith man advances into the 
region which he calls the unseen, exceeds the 



CONCERNING BELIEF 7 

boundaries of that which is necessary, trans- 
cends the ordinary reaches of human 
thought, projects himself into the so-called 
unknown, leaps across the chasm which ex- 
perience has not yet closed up, anticipates 
realities of which as yet he only has a glim- 
mering experience, and apprehends that 
which the senses do not immediately possess. 

But this power is fed and nourished by 
those roots and tendrils which find evidence 
and find sustenance in what God has revealed, 
all that whereby He makes Himself and His 
world evident. Faith lives from facts. It is 
especially this opinion we would emphasize. 
To be true to the New Testament use of the 
word "pistis," we eliminate that skepticism 
which is too often supposed to be its 
characteristic feature. 

Some of our poetry has made us familiar 
with the notion that somehow faith or belief 
is a blind groping. It is a misuse of the 
word faith or belief to use it to name this 
blind groping on the "altar-stairs that slope 
through darkness up to God." This is 
seeking faith; it is not yet faith. Faith is 
not the casting of the soul out into the -un- 
known as a child flings a stone from a sling. 

This projection of our confidence into the 
future obeys the laws of reason, of our moral 



8 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

nature, of our self. We must repudiate the 
definition a prominent writer gives when he 
says, faith is a "taking for granted that the 
promises of Jesus are true in the hopes of 
finding them so." This reverses the scrip- 
ture order, hope rests on faith, and not faith 
on hope. 

When Tennyson says: "We have but faith, 
we cannot know, for knowledge is of things 
we see," he gives expression to this common 
misuse of the words "knowledge" and 
"faith." For knowledge is not restricted to 
what we see ; nor indeed, is our faith limited 
to that which we do not see. 

The child has just as much confidence and 
faith in its father when he is holding his 
hand as when he may be removed from him. 
The more we know God, the more we believe 
and have faith in Him. 

As Prof. Ormond has said, — "What our 
judgment asserts is either the truth of the 
falsehood of some presented content." He 
says, — "We either know or believe a thing 
to be objectively true or false. We commit 
ourselves to its objective truth." 

And, he says again quite correctly: "When 
I know, I know a thing to be true; when I 
believe, I believe a thing to be true." Rob- 
ert Flint does not go too far when he says, — 



CONCERNING BELIEF V 

"Belief should be coextensive with knowl- 
edge, coincident with truth." And he 
rightly characterizes this opposition of be- 
lief and knowledge, faith and reason, as re- 
ligious agnosticism. 

Whatever real difference there is between 
belief and knowledge (and we do not deny 
that difference, though we have not time to 
discuss it) it is not a difference which makes 
belief independent of adequate evidence. 

When Dr. Moore says, "we believe on evi- 
dence that is scientifically uncertain," it 
must be answered there is no scientifically 
certain evidence. Every scientist knows (e. 
g. see Jevons' Principles of Science) that no 
evidence gets beyond the region of the prob- 
able. Only abstract reasoning is theo- 
retically certain. 

Is there, of the ten thousand things which 
we say we know, one in a hundred which we 
could demonstrate? This division of the 
consciousness into "I know" and "I believe," 
is an unphilosophical conception of knowl- 
edge which is without foundation. What we 
call our knowledge is not based on any surer 
premises than our faith. You know that the 
earth moves through space, but you know it 
upon authority. You know that there is a 
city called Peking, — you know it, probably, 



10 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

on testimony. Only the merest fragment of 
what we call knowledge is capable, if any at 
all is, of absolute demonstration in the scien- 
tific sense of the word demonstration. 

Knowledge and belief are both a per- 
suasion of the truth which is based upon evi- 
dence. The common element of belief and 
knowledge is this confidence, this persuasion 
concerning the truth. It is said: Knowl- 
edge is more certain than belief. Again and 
again, people say "When I am certain, I 
know. When I am not certain, I believe." 
No one can prevent such popular usage. 

But, so far as I am not certain I do not be- 
lieve ; I try to believe and I have no right to 
say that I do believe, however desirous 
I may be of believing. To do this, — to use a 
frank word, — is to be dishonest. Just in 
proportion as my persuasion is absolute, do 
I believe. If my persuasion is only partial, 
then the prayer must go up, — "Lord, I be- 
lieve; help thou mine unbelief." And this 
help comes through some influence, some evi- 
dence, whereby I am thoroughly persuaded 
and made confident. 

One may come to persuade himself that he 
believes in the unknown and the unknowable, 
but strict honesty with self will assure you 
that it is a mere say so, and a mere willing- 



CONCERNING BELIEF 11 

ness to believe, turned by some effort into a 
self-persuasion that one does believe. 

My confidence in the uniformity of the op- 
eration of the laws of nature is not based 
upon any absolute demonstration, nor can 
my experience of yesterday be an infallible 
witness of what shall be my experience to- 
morrow. But the experiences have awak- 
ened a confidence proportionate to their 
worth, so that I act in conformity with this 
so-called law of uniformity. So my confi- 
dence in the existence and providence of God 
is based upon experiences and evidences in 
the past which are satisfactory, which give 
me confidence. 

Pragmatism, under distinguished leader- 
ship in this country, and under Mr. Schiller in 
England (see his "Studies in Humanism") 
is, indeed, widely dominant, and must pre- 
vail so far as skepticism destroys the posi- 
tive foundations on which faith once was 
supposed to rest. 

"Faith," says Dr. Schiller, "is essentially 
a personal affair, an adventure, if you please, 
which originates in individual options, in 
choices on which men set their hearts and 
stake their lives. We must start from as- 
sumptions which we have not proved, which 
we cannot prove, which can only be verified 



12 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

after we have trusted in them. We start 
then with the postulates of faith and trans- 
mute them slowly into axioms of reason." 

As already said, there is and can be no law 
against using faith in this sense, and the 
word will continue to be so used, to name a 
willingness to venture on evidence which is 
not proof. That man is constantly required 
to do this, is beyond question. 

But what the pragmatist does not consider 
is, that this willingness, except it be a 
rational willingness, ivhich acts an sufficient 
and reasonable evidence is, so far as insane 
faith, is aberglaube, superstition. 

Faith is not mere volition or "will to be- 
lieve," it is not "the wish that is father to 
the thought, ' r it is not the child of desire, but 
of evidence. Though desire be the father, 
evidence alone is the mother. 

Faith or belief must be in proportion to 
and in degree of evidence or proof. It does 
not diminish with proof. Faith grows with 
evidence. It feeds on it. It is strong not 
through lack of evidence, but with its pos- 
session. There may be a measure of truth 
when William James says "Belief must 
always outstrip scientific evidence." 

But, it can never go further, and be ra- 
tional, than the evidence requires and war- 



CONCERNING BELIEF 13 

rants. Indeed, faith does not outstrip evi- 
dence or proof, except as the tree outstrips 
its roots. To use Prof. James' illustra- 
tion : if my faith tells me I can leap a chasm, 
unless that faith have my strength and 
agility as its basis, I shall fall into the ditch. 
In such a case the will and desire may stim- 
ulate the strength and enter into the faith as 
elements. Yet the faith or belief that I can, 
is a persuasion immediately dependent on 
my assurance as to my strength and agility. 

"The starting point of faith," says West- 
cott, "is knowledge." And, although he 
adds, "All action involves an advance into 
the unseen," yet it is an advance which rea- 
son makes reasonable, and which is neces- 
sarily an advance which has the stimulus of 
evidence behind it. 

Take away this rational element, and faith 
is in no wise distinct from any insane 
craving. God becomes but "the shadow of 
our own desire, and the dream of a worm in 
the dark." Facts, truth, knowledge, are ab- 
solutely essential to Christian faith. 

Paul would certainly contradict Dr. Moore 
when he says: "Christianity is a hypoth- 
esis to be adopted with the expectation of 
verification." It is not a mere "assump- 
tion" underlying all practical life. We can- 



14 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

not admit that "belief or faith makes no 
claim to scientific recognition." Paul did 
not go about Asia telling people that perhaps 
Jesus was the Christ and that they might 
act on this hypothesis. He persuaded men 
to believe by giving them evidence. It is not 
correct to say that man has faith "in an un- 
certain enterprise." So far as it is uncer- 
tain man cannot have faith in it. He has 
some faith and some doubt; and the doubt, 
not the faith, grows with the uncertainty. 
In these agnostic days it is actually asserted 
that the greater the doubt the greater the 
faith. So-called definitions of belief, that 
doubt is a necessary element of it, seem 
almost to make belief an absurdity. Do I 
believe a thing to be true because I doubt 
concerning its truth? Do I believe that 
Jesus Christ is the Son of God because I 
doubt whether He is the Son of God? Do 
I believe that the sun will rise to-morrow 
because I doubt whether the sun will rise to- 
morrow? 

The moment you insert doubt into the 
mind, belief is so far weakened. You know 
this in all your practical experiences. You 
believe to-day, for example, that Moses 
wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. If you have 
come under the influence of criticism you 



CONCERNING BELIEF 15 

doubt this. So far as you doubt it, you do 
not believe it. 

There are too many people who confuse "I 
believe" with "I am willing to believe"; who 
say that faith is equal to " I want to believe. ' 9 
Here is a place where Protestants certainly, 
as well as all lovers of truth, must take their 
stand and say that belief depends upon ra- 
tional evidence, and we must resist any effort 
to exalt belief or faith by making it an act 
of will whereby, apart from rational evidence, 
I say I believe that which I doubt. 

Doubt is just as distinct from belief as 
ignorance is from knowledge, and equally 
destructive. To be partly persuaded is not 
to believe. "I doubt that Jesus is my 
Saviour," does not help me to say, "I be- 
lieve that He is." To say, I doubt whether 
Shakspere wrote the plays ascribed to him, 
does not help me to say that I believe that 
he is their author. 

If the existence of God is doubtful to you, 
you do not believe it. You merely say you 
do, and try to persuade yourself to believe 
what you desire. If the Bible is to you a 
fallible book, you cannot by any means hon- 
estly make it an infallible book. 

If Jesus is not in very truth to you a 
mediator between God and man, no possible 



16 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

saying so can make Him such. We have 
cultivated a fictitious, — I might also say an 
infamous — habit of saying, ' i I believe, ' ' when 
we do not believe. This is a habit which we 
have in religion, which in secular affairs we 
would denounce as iniquitous. 

Again I repeat it, religious belief is not 
characterized by doubt, or by insufficient evi- 
dence. The evidence may be of a different 
sort in some matters of belief from that given 
in reference to other matters of belief, but 
without some evidence it is nothing less than 
criminal to believe. 

The blind man in the gospel story illus- 
trates this. He asserted to the Jews, — 
"One thing I know, whereas I was blind, 
now I see." Jesus came to him later and 
asked him, — "Dost thou believe on the Son 
of Grod?" He very properly asked, — "Who 
is he, Lord, that I might believe on him?" 
His faith came when Jesus said, — "It is he 
that talketh with thee. ' ' 

Thomas is not to be censured because he 
demanded evidence. It may be that the kind 
of evidence he demanded is not altogether 
commendable, but even so, our Lord recog- 
nized the right of evidence when he permitted 
Thomas to touch Him. And then followed 



CONCEKNING BELIEF 17 

after the evidence, the full confession, — ' ' My 
Lord and my God." 

When (as Flint quotes) Professor Thorn- 
well says: "Evidence alone should be the 
measure of assent," I add, this is merely in- 
tellectual honesty. There must be sufficient 
evidence. This sufficiency may not be found 
merely in the quantity of the evidence, but 
in its quality. Indeed, evidence is sufficient 
which satisfies the mind or the reason of men. 

As Professor Ormond says, — "When we 
accept anything as true ive accept it as being 
congruous with experience as a tvhole." 
This is essential to faith. It is certainly a 
variable matter, what evidence, both as to 
kind and quality, satisfies the rational in- 
quiry. And the demand for evidence may 
indicate a defect of the reason when it ex- 
ceeds what is in the case theoretically nec- 
essary. 

For example, the Jews demanded of Jesus 
Christ other evidence than that which He 
was constantly giving them as to His being 
the Messiah. But the fact that evidence 
out of moral proportion may be demanded by 
some, does not do away with the fact of ne- 
cessity of evidence in the matter of belief. 

This matter of evidence is very commonly 



18 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

misunderstood. People talk in a careless 
way about proof, as though there were many 
matters concerning which absolute proof can 
be given. The fact is, proof or evidence is 
simply some attendant upon a fact or idea 
whereby it is made acceptable to my reason. 
The evidence that Julius Caesar entered 
Britain is simply the sum total of all which 
can be said with reference to that fact, 
whereby it is carried forcibly and persuas- 
ively to my mind. 

In matters of religion, as in other matters, 
it is not only our right, but it is our duty to 
ask for evidence. 

The cure for error, whether in reference to 
what we say we know, or what we say we be- 
lieve, is evidence. We have no right to be- 
lieve what reason, acting upon evidence, de- 
nies. The age of reason will be the age of 
faith. 

When Paul writes, — "We walk by faith, 
and not by sight," he is not thereby saying 
that in faith there does not enter a rational 
conclusion based upon evidence, but simply 
that the evidence is not that of a physical 
kind. Faith is, and must be rational. 

It may be asked here, does not belief go 
beyond evidence? Does it not draw con- 



CONCERNING BELIEF 19 

elusions which are larger than the premises? 
What do we mean by "beyond evidence"? 
Evidence is that which satisfies the mind of 
the truth and reality of any proposition. It 
makes truth evident, clear. Belief cannot go 
beyond evidence in this respect, unless it is 
going to wander, lost, like a meteor, among 
the stars. 

The evidence which satisfies me, may not 
satisfy you. I am not drawing conclusions 
beyond the evidence when I conclude that 
which you fail to conclude. The evidence 
was all at hand long before Newton con- 
cluded concerning the law of gravitation; 
but Newton drew no conclusion beyond the 
evidence. 

The evidence was all at hand when the 
Jews crucified Christ. But John did not go 
beyond the evidence when he called Jesus the 
Son of God. 

We sometimes say that faith ventures be- 
yond knowledge. Again we must be 
cautioned as to what we mean by knowledge. 
When Columbus concluded that it would be 
safe to sail west in order to reach the coast 
of Asia, you may call this a venture of 
faith; but to Columbus it was a venture 
based upon evidence which satisfied him. 



20 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

The evidence was so convincing that no dis- 
couragements could turn him from his pur- 
pose. 

Faith is not (Dr. Moore) a willingness to 
assume for moral gain. It is just as 
iniquitous to assume for moral gain, as for 
financial, unless the so-called assumption be 
warranted by evidence, by fact. 

When it is objected by some that if faith 
rest on evidence then every doubter can say : 
I have not time nor ability to investigate; 
I would say: by just such arguments the 
Church of Eome supports her claims. 
Every error can appeal to such faith. A 
man should take time. But, things which 
man should believe are always accompanied 
by sufficient rational evidence. God bears 
witness to all truth which is really essential 
to life and salvation. 

New Testament belief is not guess work. 
Belief is not hope. The eleventh chapter of 
Hebrews is rather a description of the hope 
which has faith as its basis. It is "faith 
which is the substance of things hoped for," 
which is the evidence or proof of the unseen. 
We hope concerning the unseen because of 
faith in God, the revealed and known God. 

It is an incorrect use of language to say 
that " faith takes for granted that the prom- 



CONCERNING BELIEF 21 

ises of Christ are true in the hope of finding 
them so." This is hope, it is not faith. 

Paul tells us, "The promises of God in him 
are yea, and in him Amen ; ' ' Christ Jesus is 
Himself the great Amen, the Eternal Verity. 
Faith is not a leap into the dark. Faith has 
a firm foundation laid for it in God's word 
and work. It will not hurt us to believe less 
in quantity, provided we really believe in- 
tensely. This age wants conviction not 
creeds. 

The times seem to encourage a specious 
dishonesty in creeds. 

Mr. E. H. Hutton has said that reciting 
the Creed was not actually a statement of 
conviction, but i ' an act of intellectual adora- 
tion, " i i a solemn act of spiritual survey over 
the foundations of faith." He declared that 
"it fortifies the soul to remember facts on 
which Christianity has been based, even when 
one doubts them." The New York Evening 
Post recently called attention to the sugges- 
tion of Dr. Allen that the difficulty of pro- 
fessing a Creed might be avoided by singing 
the Articles! 

Think of it! A religion based on facts 
which one doubts ! What kind of religion 
is that? 

Eeligion, to be real, must derive its suste- 



22 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

nance from realities. I am not seeking to 
indicate what these realities are, whether 
facts past or present, but take away the truth 
of facts and the influence which they exerted 
as supposed facts ceases. 

No mere God of the imagination, known to 
be imaginary, can produce religion, because 
real belief, a belief in His reality is gone. 
Eeligion depends on reality and the belief 
in reality which makes itself, in some way, 
evident. 

Here, some one may inquire, does not the 
statement that belief is a rational persuasion 
due to evidence remove belief out of the 
moral realm? And does this not do away 
with the volitional element? We answer, 
—No. 

So far, indeed, as the will is concerned, we 
must regard the bald statement, "Will to be- 
lieve," as dangerous, unless this means 
simply willingness to believe. To believe 
aside from evidence, by an act of will, is in 
the highest degree immoral, and is deserv- 
ing of the censure which Shelley, in his 
"Queen Mab," and which Clifford pro- 
nounced against it. 

It is evident that I believe many things 
against my will. For example, I believe some 



CONCERNING BELIEF 23 

dreadful news of a disaster to those dear to 
me. The will affects belief in several ways, 
by voluntary attention, and also by an atti- 
tude of soul which is not antagonistic to the 
truth. 

Unquestionably, the emotional nature when 
it is aroused affects our susceptibility to 
evidence so that we are slow, or hesitate to 
accept that evidence at its full force. 

We cannot, indeed, always say how this 
emotional eagerness will affect one. My 
eagerness to know that a ship, which is over- 
due, has arrived, may render me over-skep- 
tical or over-credulous; but it certainly af- 
fects my relation to the report of the fact. 
The attitude of desire affects our relation 
to evidence. 

The word "belief" has as its root "be- 
lieben," or belove. A willingness to receive 
is quite necessary in the matter of belief. 
More so perhaps than it is in the matter of 
knowledge. Here, what Baldwin says is of 
force. "In faith the volitional motive is a 
sense of worth, the epistemological a consid- 
eration of truth. ' ' So that the will may help 
or hinder the sense of assurance and confi- 
dence. Worth and truth cannot conflict. 

Our Lord said, "Ye will not come unto 



1 } 4 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

me. ' ' The evidence which comes to one will- 
ing to believe is more satisfying than if one 
is unwilling to believe. 

Here then, enters the moral element; that 
my nature, my affections, expressing them- 
selves in my will, may bring me either into 
opposition to or into accord with evidence. 

Paul says of some, "The god of this 
world hath blinded the eyes of them which be- 
lieve not." It is this indifference to evi- 
dence which makes the sin of unbelief. Paul 
says therefore, of those willing to be blind, 
that they are without excuse. 

Jesus charged the Jews with sin, because 
He had given them evidence which only their 
unwillingness to receive, made them reject. 
Eemove evidence, and there is no sin in un- 
belief. Faith, as Paul says, comes by hear- 
ing. 

We are not warranted in excluding from 
belief our emotional nature. Our desires for 
the good that comes into our life through 
God and Jesus Christ, — these are parts of 
the evidence of the reality of God and our 
Saviour. 

We know that bread and water sustain life. 
It is part of the evidence that we experience 
satisfaction. 

It is part of the evidence concerning God 



CONCERNING BELIEF 25 

and our Saviour that we derive, in the exer- 
cise of faith, spiritual life. 

As Goethe said, — "Was fruchtbar ist, ist 
wahr. ' f There is a very real sense in which 
it is true that seeing is believing. I do not 
say that this belief based upon evidence, like 
every other psychological state, may not be 
subject to waves which disturb its tranquil- 
ity. Yet, beneath any superficial unrest 
there is the mighty persuasion which asserts 
itself against a superficial current of thought 
or feeling. 

" In the maddening maze of things, 
And tossed by storm and flood, 
To one fixed hope my spirit clings, 
I know that God is good." 

The struggle between faith and doubt may 
be compared to that between the tide of the 
ocean which rises to meet and to conquer the 
downward current of a river. 

That our belief may have to struggle with 
counter-currents of doubt is a fact of com- 
mon experience, which should not really dis- 
turb our faith any more than we are dis- 
turbed when we see the captain of a vessel 
sailing on a tack which takes him in the op- 
posite direction from his harbor. But the 
doubt does not make the faith, it unmakes it. 



26 WHAT SHALL, I BELIEVE 

The faith which is based on evidence, which 
extracts from it its significance, the spirit 
which has within it the spirit of the testi- 
mony of God, the belief which comes when we 
listen to facts as interpreted by the Spirit of 
God, — such persuasion in the end must con- 
quer all doubt. This is the victory. 

It is this assurance which enables one to 
venture into the unknown future, saying 
"My times are in His hands. " It is this 
faith which enables the believer to die in 
peace, and in triumph because he knows that 
his Eedeemer liveth. 

This faith steps out "on the seeming void 
and finds the rock beneath," because it 
knows that God is everywhere. It is by 
this faith, in Tennyson's words, that "We 
live the life beyond the bridge, and serve the 
infinite. ' ' 

"As blind nestlings, unafraid, 
Stretch open-mouthed to every shade 
By which their downy dream is stirred, 
Taking it for the parent bird." 

The evidence upon which our faith rests is 
multiform. It may come through many 
channels. Ultimately, it has as its source the 
spirit of truth. 



CONCERNING BELIEF 27 

" So sometimes comes to soul and sense, 
The feeling that is evidence, 
That near about us lies 
The realm of spiritual mysteries." 

We may be blind to the evidence, and live 
in doubt when we should be certain, as we 
often see a lower stratum of clouds moving in 
a direction contrary to the higher order of 
things. But, he who has evidence of the 
highest, dwells, by faith, in the celestial 
world. 

Man comes to value fact and phenomena 
at their worth to his soul. 



CONCEENING GOD 



CONCERNING GOD 

BY WILLIS JUDSON BEECHER 

" Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone ; thou hast 
made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, 
the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and 
all that is in them, and thou preservest them all; and 
the host of heaven worshipeth thee" (Neh. ix, 6, R. V.). 

These words are a section of the record of 
the prayer uttered at the reinstatement of the 
old law under Nehemiah. They are, with the 
whole prayer, a statement of the doctrine of 
Theism as that doctrine was held in Israel 
in the fifth century before Christ and in earl- 
ier centuries, and as it is still held by the ad- 
herents of the religion of Jehovah, whether 
Jews or Christians or Mohammedans. 

Our grandmothers used to tell their little 
children of a Being who made the world, a 
Being who is like us in that he knows and un- 
derstands and purposes and loves and ap- 
proves or disapproves, but who is unlike us 
in that he is infinite; a Being who is not at 
one time in one place and at another time in 
another place, but who is everywhere all the 
time; a Being who knows all our conduct, 

31 



oJ WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

and can do anything, and never makes a mis- 
take or does wrong; a Father who cares for 
ns and desires our love. When the little 
ones became old enough to go to church they 
heard the minister preach about this same 
wonderful Being. Their childish imagina- 
tions were hospitable to thoughts of this 
kind, and their minds became filled with 
ideas of God; sometimes through mistaken 
teaching with distorted and cruel ideas, but 
normally with conceptions of unimaginable 
greatness and purity and loving-kindness. 
Of course we little ones had no adequate un- 
derstanding of these ideas ; but we possessed 
them, and they stimulated our ambition to 
understand, and they had a wholesome men- 
tal and moral effect. 

This old doctrine of Theism — the doctrine 
that the supreme energy of the universe is 
an infinite Person, almighty, holy, self -reveal- 
ing, and a moral ruler — is too large a subject 
for one brief sermon. But let me call your 
attention to three propositions included in 
it. 

I. First, Theism as a doctrine includes 
whatever of truth there is in what we are ac- 
customed to describe as "the law of the per- 
sistence of energy." 

Doubtless the study of the natural sciences 



CONCERNING GOD 33 

and of evolution has led our contemporaries 
to go beyond the men of the past in empha- 
sizing the idea of Cause, continuity of force, 
uniformity of natural law. None the less 
the men of the past possessed this truth. In 
particular, theology has taught it for millen- 
niums. The difference here between a theist 
and an agnostic consists in the fact that the 
theist believes the supreme Energy to be per- 
sonal, while the agnostic denies this, or re- 
fuses to commit himself. 

Test these assertions by the text. 

" Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone ; thou hast 
made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, 
the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and 
all that is in theni; and thou preservest them all." 

Have we not here the i ' conception of cause, 
apart from particular causes ' ' ? The Cause 
is a personal will, to be sure, but it is none 
the less Cause. Have we not here energy 
persisting, bringing into existence and keep- 
ing in existence everything that is? The 
prophet says that this "cause," this 
"energy" is the personal Jehovah, but you 
can detach this part of his proposition. De- 
taching it, how does the remainder differ 
from the current scientific doctrine of the per- 
sistence of energy? 



34 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

See what the text becomes if for the per- 
sonal term "jehovah" we substitute the 
term which Mr. Herbert Spencer offers as an 
equivalent, "the Power manifested through 
phenomena." He spells Power with the 
big P. 

" Thou art the Power manifested through phenomena, 
even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of 
heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that 
are thereon, the seas and all that is in them; and thou 
preservest them all." 

Can you find fault with that, as an up-to- 
date scientific statement? Is it not precisely 
what every scientist affirms concerning "the 
Power manifested through phenomena, ' ' and 
what it has done, and is doing ? The Theism 
of Nehemiah includes this up-to-date propo- 
sition, whatever it may include additional to 
this. 

In the familiar catechism answer we are 
taught that 

a The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, accord- 
ing to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory- 
he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass." 

And a supplementary answer includes in the 
divine decrees, 

" His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and gov- 
erning all his creatures, and all their actions." 



CONCERNING GOD 35 

This is Calvinistic theology. It uses terms 
that are personal and theological. If we de- 
tach these terms, leaving the statement of 
fact by itself, then the decrees become proc- 
esses, purpose becomes causative operation, 
foreordain becomes necessitate, and we have 
something like this : 

" The processes of the Power manifested through 
phenomena are its eternal causative action, according to 
its own nature, whereby for its own manifestation it 
necessitates whatsoever comes to pass." This includes 
" its most fit and powerful preserving and controlling 
all its creatures and all their actions." 

This is not a bad formulation of the received 
scientific opinion; for science, remember, 
makes the realm of causation to include free 
beings and their actions. From the theolog- 
ical proposition omit the wise and holy will of 
God, and the remainder is the scientific prop- 
osition. Men may sneer at this teaching 
when they think of it as formulated theology ; 
they may hate it when they think of it as for- 
mulated Calvinism; but they accept it as a 
matter of course when they think of it as 
formulated science. 

Did Nehemiah or the authors of the West- 
minster standards see in natural law all that 
scientific minds now see? Probably not, 
though we have no means of making measure- 



36 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

ments. But they saw the essential truth that 
is in natural law, and they formulated it, 
though in theological terms. 

My affirmation is that Theism as a doctrine 
includes so much of the doctrine of the per- 
sistence of energy as it finds to be true. 
Theism does not concern itself with the con- 
flicting theories concerning evolution and 
other natural processes. In this matter of 
universal causation Theism and Science are 
alike confronted with the question of the free 
will of God or of man, and the difficulties are 
the same for both. Whatever will solve the 
difficulties for science will solve them for 
theology. The theological proposition, how- 
ever, includes more than the scientific 
proposition. If professed agnostics deny 
that the Power manifested in phenomena is 
spiritual and personal, Theism replies : In 
this you are not true agnostics; you are as- 
serting that which you do not know. If they 
say that the phenomena and the physical 
force are all that we know, Theism takes issue 
with them on the question of fact. It declares 
that we know that there is something more 
ultimate than natural laws, that these are not 
Deity but only the processes in which Deity 
operates. It affirms that evolution cannot 



CONCERNING GOD 37 

account for all things, but that it needs to be 
itself accounted for. 

II. As a second proposition, Theism as a 
doctrine includes whatever of truth there is 
in the idea of God as a spiritual Being imma- 
nent in all things. 

When people speak of the immanence of 
God, I think that different persons intend 
different meanings. Some seem to have the 
idea of Deity as a sort of tenuous ether dif- 
fused everywhere. Others, apparently, say 
that God is immanent as a euphemistic way 
of saying that there is no God, but only athe- 
istic natural law. Others exhibit a crude 
pantheism, holding that the universe is God 
and that there is no God save the universe. 
Nevertheless there is a true doctrine of the 
divine immanence. To the idea of infinite 
force exerting itself in all things add the idea 
that this force is spiritual in its nature, and 
you have a doctrine of God as immanent. Or, 
if you prefer, say that there is an infinite 
Being who exerts the force; though in that 
case the real ultimate Force is the Being who 
exerts rather than the force which is exerted. 
The theistic doctrine of the immanence of 
Deity is that God is omnipresent Spirit ; that 
the supreme universal Energy is of the nature 



38 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of spiritual Being, having analogies in our 
human experiences of mind and heart and 
purpose rather than in physical phenomena ; 
that infinite Spirit exerts the power mani- 
fested through phenomena, or, if you prefer, 
is that Power. 

Mr. Luther Burbank, distinguished for the 
wonderful transformations in plant life which 
he has succeeded in producing, is credited 
with the following utterance: 

"All ray investigations have led me away from the 
idea of a dead material universe tossed about by various 
forces, to that of a universe which is absolutely all 
force, life, soul, thought, or whatever name we may 
choose to call it. Every atom, molecule, plant, animal 
or planet is only an aggregation of organized unit 
forces, held in place by stronger forces, thus holding 
them for a time latent, though teeming with inconceiv- 
able power." " The universe is not half dead, but all 
alive" (Congregationalist of Jan. 12, 1907 page 48). 

Get hold of this thought. Here is a bulk of 
something, a fragment of mineral, a piece of 
wood or other vegetable product, what you 
will. It seems inert, mere lifeless matter. 
In reality it is a magazine of stored energy. 
It seems powerless simply because its energy 
is held in equilibrium by other energy. 
Change the conditions, and it may be found 
to contain a whole earthquake of explosive 



CONCERNING GOD 39 

force; or the energy may manifest itself in 
gentler forms, for example in light or warmth 
or color or growth of plant or animal. This 
infinite energy, whether manifested or latent, 
existing in the whole universe and at every 
point in the universe — what is it? 

We enter upon no philosophical answer to 
this question. We advance no theory as to 
the ultimate nature of realities, or as to the 
Absolute, or Unconditioned Being, or Infinite 
Existence, or the Soul of the universe, or the 
Life of the universe, or its essence, or its or- 
ganic principle. In this region Theism has 
just one great question to ask, and it is a 
question for plain people as well as for phi- 
losophers. Its question is this: Is the su- 
preme Energy spiritual? In its manifesta- 
tions are we to recognize merely the physical 
process of moving things, or are we also to 
recognize intelligence and emotion and pur- 
pose? 

Mr. Burbank's answer, as just read, is that 
the universe "is absolutely all force, life, 
soul, thought, or whatever name we may 
choose to call it." Not knowing his point of 
view, I do not know exactly how much this 
means ; but it can hardly mean less than that 
the manifestations of the supreme Energy 
everywhere indicate intelligence and purpose. 



40 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

And I suppose that this at present is the gen- 
eral verdict of scientific men. To affirm that 
the supreme Energy is not intelligent is to 
go beyond the extremest range of agnosti- 
cism; it is utter and groundless dogmatism. 
The utmost extreme to which an agnostic can 
go is that of saying that he does not know 
whether the supreme Energy is intelligent, 
and I think that agnostics who go as far as 
this are as rare as snowbanks in July. I 
once saw in July the remains of a snowbank 
hidden away in a sunless ravine, but I never 
saw another. 

A man may supposably convince himself 
that the entering in of intelligence as a part 
of the phenomena of our earth came at an ad- 
vanced stage of evolution, that it took mil- 
lions of years for the earth to evolve up to the 
point of having intelligent inhabitants. But 
such a man is not likely to hold that this was 
the beginning of intelligence in the universe ; 
for he will probably hold that the same stage 
of evolution was reached in numberless other 
planets uncounted ages before the evolution 
of the earth began. And how could such evo- 
lution go forward except as guided by pre- 
existing intelligence? How could it exhibit 
intelligence unless there were intelligence to 
exhibit? I think that men were never more 



CONCEKNING GOD 41 

firmly convinced than now that the manifes- 
tation of force which we see everywhere is 
not merely mechanical, but is in some real 
sense intelligent and purposive. 

Nehemiah's view in the matter is clear. He 
represents that the Energy which made and 
upholds the heavens and the earth is nothing 
else than Jehovah himself ; and that Jehovah, 
being the God of Israel, loving Israel and 
mankind, carrying forward plans in the ma- 
terial universe and in human history, is in- 
telligent and spiritual in his being. 

This same conception of a supreme spir- 
itual Energy immanent in all that exists is 
either expressed or implied in all the numer- 
ous passages of the Old and the New Testa- 
ments which speak of the omnipresence and 
the omniscience of God; and it has been 
among the commonplaces of all the great 
teachers of theistic theology. 

The conception of universal Force as of the 
nature of spiritual Being, lying hidden every- 
where, and sometimes manifesting itself in 
personal forms, has a place of some sort in 
most of the inferior religions. Every fetich 
has its personal character, malignant or be- 
nign. Ancestor worship has an aspect of per- 
sonal relationship to the Power that brought 
us into being. The very essence of all the 



42 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

forms of Animism is the recognition of sup- 
posed spiritual existence in the phenomena we 
observe, and of our supposed ability some- 
times to catch glimpses of such existence. 
All the nymphs of water and wood and moun- 
tain are witnesses to this operation of man's 
religious instincts. When men worship the 
powers of nature, the sun or the ocean or the 
storms, they think of these as exercising in- 
telligence and emotion and purpose. Some 
of the gods thus worshiped have been good 
and some bad, but whether good or bad, the 
worship is a recognition of marks of person- 
ality in the ultimate Power that manifests it- 
self in all things. 

This doctrine of God as immanent in the 
universe is sometimes spoken of as essential 
Pantheism; and we are referred to the 
Theosophies of India as giving the best expo- 
sition of it. In regard to this I must plead 
ignorance. But I think that I cannot be mis- 
taken in saying that Pantheism has a wide 
range; that while in its highest forms it is 
scarcely distinguishable from Theism, its 
lower forms have all the vices and none of the 
vitality of proper Polytheism ; that in its doc- 
trine of the divine immanence it ranges from 
the conception of God as a form of matter or 
as an all-pervasive, emotionless, purposeless 



CONCERNING GOD 43 

Fate to that of an omnipresent infinite intelli- 
gence; that its Nirvana — its goal of hnman 
existence — ranges from blank annihilation to 
something like the peace of eternal blessed- 
ness. We are all familiar with Tennyson's 
much quoted stanza : 

Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with 

spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 

and feet. 

Mr. Tennyson correctly presents this as the 
vision toward which "the higher Pantheism" 
is desperately struggling. But it is a goal 
that Theism reached long ago. It is a teach- 
ing that has been one of the commonplaces 
of Theism from the time of Abraham and 
earlier. 

III. And so we come to a third proposi- 
tion. Theism as a doctrine includes what- 
ever of truth there is in the idea of God as 
transcendent over all things; and especially 
of God as the interested, self -revealing Ruler 
and Saviour of men. 

It is not only true that there is an infinite 
Power back of all things, and that this Power 
is Spirit ; it is also true that this Power, this 
Spirit, is self-revealing to the spirits whom 
he has brought into being. 



44 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

If one is convinced that the changes which 
manifest the supreme Cause are not the 
merely mechanical moving of things, but are 
the intelligent moving of things for a pur- 
pose, why should he doubt that the intelligent 
Mover is a Being who is interested in the uni- 
verse which he thus perpetuates ? Why deny 
that he distinguishes between right and 
wrong? that he is, to use Matthew Arnold's 
fine phrase, "a Power, not ourselves, that 
makes for righteousness"? in other words, 
that he is moral Ruler for the world? Why 
deny that he may have kindly or disapprov- 
ing feelings toward his creatures? or that he 
may take especial means for revealing him- 
self to them? 

The human religious instincts have always 
made demand for this character in the Deities 
that men have worshiped. It is this that has 
given some vitality to even the polytheisms 
and other inferior religions. The gods of the 
nations have been thought of as emotional 
beings, taking an interest in their worshipers 
— sometimes a malignant or cruel or selfish 
interest, but an interest of some kind. When 
men have permitted their monotheistic the- 
ology to become too abstract, then they have 
turned aside to the worship of Mother Na- 
ture, or have interposed saints or angels or 



CONCERNING GOD 45 

the Virgin between themselves and Deity. 
The human mind cannot content itself with a 
more philosophical Deity; it must have a God 
that watches and cares and loves. 

Nehemiah holds this view. The Being 
whom he addresses as the maker and sus- 
tainer of heaven and earth is the one whom 
he thinks of as the national God of Israel, a 
Being of emotions, who loves right and hates 
wrong, who is capable of being pleased or dis- 
pleased ; and who is revealing himself to man- 
kind through his dealings with Israel, his 
chosen people. The same doctrine appears 
elsewhere in the Old and New Testaments, 
and in the works of the theologians. These 
teach that the self-revelation of God is 
through all the universe as a medium, but 
especially through the history of Israel, and 
through Jesus Christ, and through the Scrip- 
tures as the record concerning Israel and the 
Christ, and through the Holy Spirit as inter- 
preting the universe and the sacred history 
and Christ and the Scriptures. 

Is there any reason for being inhospitable 
to this teaching? Men agree that the Power 
manifested through phenomena has used the 
Greeks and their literature to accomplish cer- 
tain results in human civilization, and the 
Eomans and their literature to accomplish 



46 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

certain other results, and other peoples and 
their literatures to accomplish yet other re- 
sults; why should not some people be 
especially used by the infinite Power for the 
self-revelation of that Power to men? and 
why should not that people be Israel? And 
why should not the revelation thus made be 
recognizable and credible? 

And if the Energy that operates in natural 
law has intelligence and purpose and feeling, 
must we not conceive of it, or rather of him, 
as the Master of natural law, and not the 
slave? Why should we deny that this 
Energy, in its processes of self-revelation, 
may even transcend natural law as under- 
stood by finite men? 

If we have this conception of a thinking, 
feeling, purposing Energy, existing every- 
where and maintaining all things in existence, 
then a necessary part of the conception is that 
the Energy is capable of personal relations 
with such other thinking, feeling, purposing 
beings as may anywhere exist. There may 
be fellowship between the infinite Spirit and 
finite spirits. 

u Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with 
spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands and 
feet." 



CONCERNING GOD 47 

Prayer and a response to it may be realities. 
Between God and us there may be reciprocal 
love, and a common interest in common aims, 
and mutual rejoicings and sympathies. He 
is our sovereign, acknowledging responsibil- 
ities toward us, and holding us responsible. 
And this is practically the great thing in the- 
istic doctrine. God immanent in the uni- 
verse, the infinite First Cause, the Essence 
of all that is or shall be, is a theme for high 
thinking; but whether we can do high think- 
ing or not, we have to do hour by hour with 
God, the Companion and Helper and Judge 
of men, with God who claims our allegiance 
and trust and love and obedience. 

We make a mistake if we confine our think- 
ing to either of the two conceptions — God im- 
manent or God transcendent. God is infinite, 
and finite terms are inadequate to express 
him, and yet we have none but finite terms. 
We speak of the hand of God, the finger of 
God, his eye, his ear, his voice, his spoken 
command. In our human way of speaking, 
that which is unworthy is conceived of as low, 
and that which is excellent as high; and we 
therefore speak of God as exalted, as dwell- 
ing in the skies. We conceive him as omni- 
present, and yet we speak of his local mani- 
festation anywhere as his coming to that 



48 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

place ; and when we lack the consciousness of 
his sympathy we speak of his being absent, or 
of his hiding his face. We represent him as 
sitting on a throne, as arising to attend to 
affairs, as mustering armies, as surrounded 
by a retinue, as doing the things that a human 
king does. Of course we intend all this as 
figure of speech, though as figure which 
stands for something that is most utterly real ; 
but we are constantly in danger of mistaking 
the figure of speech for the reality. "We need 
to have the habit of limiting our expressions 
of this class by keeping in mind the idea of 
God as the infinite Energy immanent every- 
where. 

Sometimes we start to obtain an idea of 
the divine personality by working our way up 
from the best that we know of human person- 
ality. If we neglect the limiting truth that 
God is the infinite and universally manifested 
Power, we shall thus reach only finite concep- 
tions of him. 

It has been repeatedly charged of late that 
the Church teaches the doctrine of an "ab- 
sentee God," who resides away from the 
human part of the universe, and concerns 
himself with us only when we remind him to 
do so. As against the Church or the Scrip- 
tures or the great teachers of Theism this 



CONCERNING GOD 49 

charge is monstrously untrue ; but I am afraid 
it is true in part against many individuals 
who regard themselves as theists. I suspect 
that certain changes which have fallen under 
my own observation are typical. In my child- 
hood I heard ministers preach about the im- 
manence and the transcendence of God, about 
his omnipotence and his omnipresence and 
the difference between an infinite Person and 
finite persons. I did not find this wildly in- 
teresting; it was no more so than the multi- 
plication table; but it was one of the staple 
commodities which the pulpit offered. Later 
a change came. People got to saying that 
these metaphysical distinctions concerning 
Deity were abstruse and unprofitable; that 
what men need to hear is that God is their 
Friend and Father and Saviour. Since then 
the teaching that I have heard concerning 
God has consisted mainly in anthropomorphic 
statements of our practical relations to him 
— statements that are correct and important, 
but which taken alone constitute an utterly 
one-sided doctrine. I fear that there are 
many Christians whose conception of God is 
that of a mere magnified man. I fear that 
others have the opposite one-sided concep- 
tion, and think of God as a sort of ether or 
impersonal force diffused through space. In 



50 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

their revulsion from inadequate conceptions 
like these, some doubtless come to think of 
God as not a reality, but rather a personifica- 
tion of an ideal which they have formed, or 
perhaps as a merely hypothetical being. 
"When Mr. Ingersoll said that "an honest God 
is the noblest work of man," his implication 
was that God is merely a figure whom people 
construct in their imaginations. I am afraid 
that Mr. Ingersoll is not solitary in his 
theology. 

One-sided conceptions will not answer the 
purpose. It is not enough to say that God 
is universal Energy; he is also Spirit. It is 
not enough to say that God is Spirit, unless 
we mean that he is also the Energy that sus- 
tains the universe. God is Love, you tell 
me ? Yes, but God is also Power. If he were 
not infinite Power, his being Love would not 
count for so much as it does; if he were not 
infinite Love, his being Power would be a 
tiling dreadful to contemplate. He is not 
merely infinite, but an infinite Person; he is 
not merely a Person, but an infinite Person. 
He is indeed the highest conceivable ideal of 
personality, but he is so in virtue of his being 
the most real Person in the universe. 

Doubtless the highest form of theistic doc- 
trine is that presented in the teachings and 



CONCERNING GOD 5 1 

the character of Jesus Christ. He is himself 
the completest revelation of Deity to man, 
God manifest in the flesh. By understanding 
the man Jesus we may climb up to some un- 
derstanding of the divine personality. But 
this is because Jesus is not merely manifest 
in the flesh, but God manifest in the flesh. 
He himself concentrates the whole theistic 
doctrine into the phrase "our Father who art 
in heaven." Xot our Father merely, but our 
Father in heaven: in heaven, and therefore 
far off, beyond all known space, filling the 
universe, the Power manifested in all things 
that are. Xot merely the Almighty in 
heaven, but Father in heaven — Father, and 
therefore near at hand, in our hearts, in our 
circumstances, having tender relations with 
every person. Xot simply Father in heaven, 
but our Father, recognizing our birth claim 
upon him, communicative, responsive. Our 
Father in heaven, accessible even though he 
is hidden in the thick mysteries of his uni- 
verse! We cannot comprehend God, any 
more than the great statesman's baby can 
comprehend the statesman's mind and the 
vast interests that center there; but we can 
know God, as the baby boy knows his re- 
nowned father when the father takes care of 
him, and they talk and smile together. 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 



CONCERNING JESUS CHEIST 

BY JAMES STEVENSON KIGGS 

There is perhaps no question which Jesus 
ever asked having in it a more penetrating 
and searching significance than that one ad- 
dressed to the disciples at Caesarea Philippi, 
"Who say ye that I am?" I can easily in 
imagination picture Him as awaiting its 
answer with tremulous eagerness, for it was 
not merely an intellectual judgment that He 
was seeking ; it was a life acknowledgment, a 
heart acceptance, a conception of Him which 
should dominate the affections and the will 
as well as the thought. And this is the pecul- 
iar thing about Jesus Christ, upon which I 
wish to fasten attention for a moment. His- 
tory places before you the record of the deeds 
and character of its leaders and heroes. You 
pass judgment upon them, but they are little 
more to you than the names of the past. You 
have an intelligent conception of their rela- 
tion to the events and forces which with them, 
and by them, brought about given issues. 
55 



56 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

Except to admire those qualities in them 
which brought worthy results to pass, they 
have for me little personal interest. It is, 
of course, possible to pass judgment upon 
Jesus Christ in the same way. Many men 
are content with simply an intellectual judg- 
ment of Him — calling Him "a noble man," 
"a great moral teacher," or even, it may be 
"a prophet." "While all these estimates are 
true, it is also true that they by no means 
satisfy the estimate which Jesus made of 
Himself, and which His Church has, through 
all the centuries since the Resurrection made 
of Him. It is not simply with a name of the 
past that in Him we have to do. The Gospel 
of Jesus is not merely a record of past 
achievement; it is a gospel — a word of 
present blessing and imperative demand. It 
comes to us not with simply a pleasing narra- 
tive of high-minded living and noble philan- 
thropy. It sets forth against the back- 
ground of Galilee and Judaea a personality 
whose claim is that He is the Saviour of the 
world; who says "Come unto me," "Follow 
me. ' ' When you seek to know about Him, to 
place yourself so that you may critically ex- 
amine Him, you very soon find that you can- 
not escape the spiritual discernment He 
brings to bear upon you. Though He lived 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 57 

and spoke in a far-away land there is a 
timeless and climeless element in what He 
said. Give conscience the right of way and 
it urges decisions in view of what it hears. 
Follow the finger pointing to those decisions 
and yon will come into that region of expe- 
rience where the great abiding principles of 
spiritual truth hold sway — nay, more than 
that, where Christ Himself — who is the ex- 
ponent of all spiritual truth becomes the in- 
spiration and the source of life. Not long 
since a valuable book came out entitled ' ' The 
Christ of History and of Experience." 

That title sets forth in full the twofold 
aspect under which Christ may be considered 
— and He can never be completely considered 
until both aspects come under consideration. 
When you read a "Life of Christ" you have 
one aspect; when you live the life of Christ 
you are in the way of an ever larger un- 
derstanding of the other. To stop with one 
aspect is to leave Him in a position entirely 
external. He is simply a great religious 
teacher who long since blessed a few lives; 
stirred up the hatred of the Jews, and was 
crucified. To take with this the other, is to 
make Him a living, uplifting, saving reality 
in your life for evermore. Of course you see 
that one aspect requires only mental recog- 



58 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

nition and rational intelligence; the other, 
with these, obedience, loyalty, devotion. 

In asking you to consider with me for a few 
moments what the Church believes concern- 
ing Jesus Christ I shall speak with reference 
to both aspects as they are blended in the 
whole New Testament. It is said sometimes 
that the facts of the Gospels are no longer 
necessary to the existence of Christianity, 
that if our Gospels were completely lost, 
Christianity would live on. If that is not a 
mere speculative proposition then an answer 
to it seems to me to lie in the preservation of 
the Scriptures against the repeated attacks of 
all forms of destructive criticism. Historical 
criticism may change our view of the method 
or time in which some of the books of the 
Bible came to be. No book is at all likely to 
be put out of the sacred canon. Nor are we in 
any great danger of losing any of the facts of 
the life of Jesus. They have been assailed, 
yes, nearly every one, from the Virgin birth 
to the Eesurrection — but the Church has not 
given them up. Indeed, in her conflict with 
various philosophies and would-be scientific 
criticism she has found clearer reason to 
stand by these foundations of her faith. The 
Incarnation, the Galilaean ministry with all 
its record of work and miracle ; the scenes of 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 59 

the Fourth Gospel, the memories of Passion 
week, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, these 
are her sacred treasure — kept, under God, 
and defended by the ablest scholarship, and 
not seldom by her blood. Never was it pos- 
sible to see more clearly than now the figure 
of the Christ of history as He is made to 
stand out against the historical background 
of the first century in its complex of social, 
civil, and religious life. If we know men by 
knowing them in their times ; by knowing the 
forces with which or against which they had 
to labor, then we can know, and do know Him 
historically. 

But, as I have said, in all this, we have 
only the data for our faith. "We study the 
facts only that we may get a clearer view of 
the personality — the personality making high 
claims, uttering large promises, demanding 
moral decisions. And now if we are not to 
leave the whole result external to us — a mere 
matter of history, we must begin that quest 
which moves along the way of obedience and 
discipleship. What the church believes is 
the outcome of this double effort to get at the 
meaning of the Christ. Through the historic 
Christ she has come to know the essential 
Christ, by meeting the requirements of the 
truth which was so wonderfully revealed in 



60 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the life and words and resurrection of Jesus 
of Nazareth. And by the essential Christ, I 
mean the Christ who can satisfy the deepest 
needs of the heart — the Christ, who in expe- 
rience is not only the ideal of the most spirit- 
ual life, but its power and its hope. This is 
the Christ in whom we believe. All we know 
and believe regarding Him is summed up in 
the name — Jesus Christ. Jesus representing 
to us the few years of earthly history in Pal- 
estine, Christ, the entire spiritual import of 
that history both then and now. 

To an explication of that "spiritual im- 
port" I wish now to devote the rest of my 
time. I can ask you to look at but the merest 
outline, but sufficient, I hope, for you to see 
how vital and essential it all is. First then, 
the "spiritual import" of Christ is that: 

I. He is to its the revelation of the char- 
acter of God. I hardly have need to say to 
earnest, thoughtful men that God is the ulti- 
mate reality with which we all have to do. 
In some form of religion men have always 
been trying to make that fact manifest. 
"Whatever the form, it has never been higher 
than the conception of God which inspired it. 
The shocking and pitiable cruelties of bar- 
baric ritual; the fierce, intolerant bigotry of 
such defenders of faith as have not scrupled 



CERNIBG JESUS OHBIST 61 

to use the sword and the rack; the sacrificial 
altars which the world around have been the 
means of changing the disposition of Deity; 
the creeds which have embodied this concep- 
tion or that, have all had their reason, in the 
last analysis, in what men have thought of 
God. Shadowed conceptions of God are 
easily possible. Nor can we think of Deity 
with any vital form in our thinking if we try 
to keep to philosophic descriptions, such as 
First Cause, the Absolute, Pure Being, and 
the like. Eelations which shall be intelligible 
to us must be defined in terms which belong 
to life itself, with all its warmth and energy. 
When therefore, Jesus says, "He that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father," with what 
eagerness do we look to see what the revela- 
tion is. Xor are we to look for it in simply 
what He says, exalted as that is : it is in Him 
that we are to look for it. You will at once 
see that it is God expressed in human rela- 
tions that we are to fix our eyes upon. But 
they are inadequate to the scope of the reve- 
lation, some one may object. Yes, if you 
are looking for those attributes which we are 
led to think upon when we consider the vast 
expanse of the heavens, or the origin of the 
universe. The problems of the Spirit are the 
problems of life — and it is the problems of 



62 WHAT SHALL, I BELIEVE 

the Spirit which Jesus came to solve. It is 
only as life can reveal God that Jesus reveals 
Him. He lived therefore, that through his 
life we might know God. The uniqueness of 
that life is in the perfection of its revelation. 
It is no broken light; no fragment of good- 
ness; no half -wrought harmony of moral 
qualities. The more we comprehend it, the 
more astonishing it seems. Every right re- 
lation is flawlessly right. Both toward God 
and men, it has no fault. It touches neither 
the hardness of ascetism on one side, nor the 
weakness of sentimentalism on the other. It 
moves in the world, amid its social joys, in 
contact with all classes of men and women, 
and yet was not of the world to a degree that 
is difficult to realize. With a wealth of 
sympathy that was boundless, it inspired 
hope, strength and courage wheresoever it 
could find an open way for influence. With 
the sharp judgment of truth it cut to the quick 
the falsity and pretension of sin. It tore the 
mask from unreality. It yearned over those 
who were the victims of ignorance in spiritual 
things. It invited and urged men to be good. 
It tried patiently to write out in words and 
deeds that which we think ought to have been 
understood, the spiritual meaning of the 
Messiah, and in fulfillment of its great pur- 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 63 

pose to reveal the very heart of God it 
accepted the shameful death of crucifixion 
rather than deflect a hair's breadth from the 
will of Him to whom it was consecrated. 
Much is being said just now against the 
miraculous in the New Testament, but the sin- 
lessness of Jesus is in itself a moral miracle, 
and it must be reckoned with before we can 
make too confident assertion about the minor 
miracles of the Gospel story. I question 
whether there is any doctrine of our faith 
concerning Jesus which carries more with it. 
Poor, indeed, have been the attempts to over- 
throw it. They have usually been the out- 
come of some intense anti-supernatural 
theory, or else have been inspired by a sneer. 
Nowhere else in all the records of earthly 
deeds and happenings can you find such a 
parallel of constant, inflexible, searching con- 
demnation of sin, with at the same time an 
exhibition of merciful, self-sacrificing, forgiv- 
ing love as in these brief, straightforward 
narratives. When Christ says, therefore, 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," 
that is what the revelation of God is to us. 
There was but one name which Jesus could 
use to cover it all, and that was "Father," 
and by a direct statement and by parable, as 
well as by His every deed He has tried to 



64 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

make clear to us that the divine reality be- 
hind this visible universe is (to borrow the 
words of Bishop Morehouse), "the will to 
love" — (to love widely, unchangeably). 
The Fatherhood of God as thus conceived is 
the "master thought" of Christ's teaching. 
It can run no risks of being pushed into the 
service of sentimental weakness toward sin, 
as long as we keep our eyes upon the holy 
life of the Master ; nor can the name of God 
be used in connection with hard and loveless 
dogmas as long as we keep the unfailing 
sympathy, and self-sacrificing love of that 
same life before us. I have not time to tell 
you how the doctrine of the Fatherhood of 
God has been magnified in modern thinking ; 
I can only say that it has all come by the way 
of the study of Christ — and in view of it that 
agnosticism (a Greek word meaning know- 
nothingism), which with its refusal to look 
into the New Testament declares that God 
cannot be known, is indeed pathetic. It cer- 
tainly is the belief of every earnest Christian, 
that no man can justify himself in such igno- 
rance unless he has earnestly put to the test 
the words of the Master, that He is the way 
to the Father. 

Again, to the Church the "spiritual im- 
port" of Christ is that: 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 05 

//. He is the ivay and means to us of 
God's forgiveness. When men argue from 
their ability to forgive to God's ability to do 
the same, it seems like a simple argument 
from the less to the greater. In fact it is so 
easily done that it leads to very lax concep- 
tions of God's estimate of wrongdoing. If I 
have sinned against God and I repent of my 
sin, what else is there for Him to do, but to 
forgive me? That looks like a simple, 
straightforward question. Is not that all 
that appears in the parable of the Prodigal 
Son ? He comes to himself amid the degrad- 
ing surroundings of the far country and says, 
"I will go home and say to my father — 
' Father I have sinned against heaven'." 
The story then tells us of the father 's welcome 
and the merrymaking over him who had been 
lost but now was found. Is not that the Gos- 
pel in miniature? If by gospel in that ques- 
tion is meant the whole Gospel, the answer is 
quickly given — "No, it is not the whole Gos- 
pel, but only so much as Jesus meant to illus- 
trate by that parable." Between any man's 
confession of sin, and God's forgiveness 
stands all that is signified in the Gospel 
story by the cross. Do you think that that 
is little? Long ago, Plato said, "I think that 
God can forgive sin, but I do not see how," 



66 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

and that was because he had seen "that evil 
and its due reward are, in a moral world, 
riveted together. ' ' It was Dr. Chalmers who 
used to say that "forgiveness is a problem 
fit for a God. 9 ' If sin had been of such small 
account that acknowledgment of its wrong 
were enough to secure its forgiveness, then 
the whole attitude of Jesus toward it in the 
New Testament is an exaggeration. On the 
contrary, because of it, He was "a man of 
sorrows, and acquainted with grief." The 
burden of it rested ceaselessly upon His heart, 
and the anguish of the cross had in this the 
explanation of its awful intensity. All 
through the New Testament that suffering is 
connected with our forgiveness, or rather our 
forgiveness is inseparably connected with it. 
Why must Christ suffer and die that we might 
be forgiven ? That is the central question of 
the doctrine of the Atonement. It has been 
variously answered, but no answer fails to 
recognize the fact that man lives in an eth- 
ical universe in which the connection between 
evil and its due judgment cannot be set aside 
without involving in the end moral anarchy. 
And so, as one has well said, God's problem 
"is to save men who by the ethical order of a 
moral universe are condemned, and at the 
same time save the ethical order that con- 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 67 

demns them," or to put it in Paul's words, 
to "be just, and the justifier of him that hath 
faith in Jesus" (Romans iii, 26). Nor does 
the death of the cross give us all that we need 
to bring to us this forgiveness. That release 
from the guilt of sin which is spoken of when 
Paul declares that there is "now no con- 
demnation to them that are in Christ Jesus, ' ' 
comes only to those who are in life one with 
Christ. Concisely and truthfully has it been 
said that "No one is ready for forgiveness 
who has not repented, no one has received for- 
giveness who is not being sanctified." The 
forgiveness of the Gospel is, thus you see, no 
easy, superficial blessing such as may be an 
ordinary human forgiveness. It caused God 
to send His Son to dwell among us, to identify 
Himself with us, to die for us and then to 
dwell within us. Surely, it must be difficult 
to understand all this, if one has no sense of 
the sinfulness of sin. Tetzel stood in the 
market places of Germany and sold the for- 
giveness of sin for money, and all the while 
the religious society of which he formed a 
part, sank deeper and deeper into sin. I have 
heard men turn from the confession of their 
sins, through the mouth of the priest, to curse 
the very name which a few moments before 
they were professing to worship. The for- 



68 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

giveness of God in Christ allows no such pos- 
sibility in the life that has received it. No 
man who knows what divine forgiveness has 
cost can bargain with sin. The cross has be- 
come the symbol of the Church of love and 
sacrifice, but it is also the symbol of the 
divine hatred of sin. It is not strange 
in the light of all this that the Chris- 
tian sings : " In the Cross of Christ I glory. ' ' 
By and through Him whom it always brings 
to mind, we have come to freedom from the 
burden of sin, to peace with God. The doc- 
trine of the Atonement is the very heart of 
the New Testament. 

Once more, the spiritual import of Christ 
is that: 

III. He is the motive poiver of the Chris- 
tian life. I must ask you now to listen to that 
which at first may have a mystical sound, 
but which after all, touches one of the great 
vital beliefs we have regarding Christ. More 
than one Christian, as he has read the Gos- 
pels has wished that he might once have come 
into the presence of Jesus and heard Him 
speak. No small part of the pleasure in vis- 
iting the Holy Land to-day, is in making vivid 
and real by experience the scenery through 
which He walked. So hungry are the senses 
for help toward the realization of His per- 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST G9 

sonality. You will recall that at the time 
when the apostles were cast down and 
trembled because they were to see Him but 
for a little while, He made those promises 
about "not leaving them comfortless" and 
about being always with them, "even unto 
the end of the world. ' ' Such words from an 
earthly friend would mean to us that in the 
memories we have of him he would live on 
with us, but Jesus meant far more than this. 
And when you turn to the Epistles there is 
in them no " in memoriam ' ' strain. They are 
full of the confidence that with them is the 
Spirit of Christ. So much is this so, that an 
earnest student of these Epistles declares 
that the great feature of this literature is 
this: that its writers "are so sure that the 
Spirit of Jesus is moving them, moulding 
them and transforming them, really, directly, 
powerfully, personally, as when He walked 
on earth, and spoke to them." The doctrine 
of the indwelling Christ is one of Paul's great 
teachings. He writes to the Galatians, "It 
is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in 
me" (Gal. ii, 20). His glad confidence of 
power and ultimate triumph is due to this 
spiritual power within him. Whenever in 
the history of the Church there has been an 
awakening, this faith as taken new vitality in 



70 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the consciousness of serious and devout Chris- 
tians. Luther used to say, "Should any- 
one knock at my breast and say 'Who lives 
here?' I should reply, 'Not Martin Luther, 
but the Lord Jesus.'" (Table Talk.) In 
his "Letters to His Sister," General Gordon 
dwells again and again upon the power and 
peace that come from the faith that the liv- 
ing Christ is present within us. Take those 
three names together, Paul, Luther, Gordon, 
and reflect for a moment upon their strenuous 
activities, their large achievement, and their 
active, wide-reaching influence, and then see 
whether the objection that the doctrine is 
too mystical is worthy of consideration. In- 
deed, have we not rather a great distinctive 
teaching of Christianity, which makes the 
Christian life an intensely vital matter? 
When Jesus replied to the perplexed Thomas, 
He said to him, I am the Way, by being the 
truth, and by being the life. How more 
completely could the whole Way be covered? 
If truth gave the ideals and principles, life 
should give the power. It makes our salva- 
tion all of Christ, i. e., the provisions for 
it, the ideals connected with it, and the 
power to realize it, are all of Him. The one 
thing we have to do is by an obedient will 
and a devoted heart to keep ourselves open 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 71 

to the influences which He brings to bear 
upon us — in line with the power which He is 
ready to exert within us. We are not by 
wearisome doings of any kind whatsoever to 
try and lift ourselves to Heaven. We are 
simply to give place to the heavenly force that 
is within us. In this way the Church itself 
becomes an incarnation of Christ. As He 
incarnated God, so we incarnate Him. In 
one of those addresses which brought to so 
many spiritual illumination, Henry Drum- 
mond began by quoting Huxley, who said, * ' I 
protest, that if some great power would agree 
to make me always think what is true and do 
what is right, on condition of being turned 
into a sort of clock, and wound up every 
morning, I should instantly close with the 
offer. " " That offer I propose to make now, ' 9 
said the speaker. ' ' In all seriousness without 
being ' turned into a sort of clock' the end 
can be attained, ' ' and then he set forth in his 
own way this reality of Christ, the motive 
power. A noble portion it is in the good tid- 
ings of the Gospel. Once more, the "spir- 
itual import" of Christ is that: 

IV. He is the Surety of our final and com- 
plete redemption. In all that I have thus far 
said, He is to us the means and power of spir- 
itual development — here, amid these sur- 



72 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

roundings of earth and sense. What of it all 
when the last supreme hour of life comes to 
each of us? If glory is to be given to the 
name of Christ for the work He can do for 
us in giving us peace with God, and the con- 
struction of a worthy character, what shall we 
say when we come to see what both facts 
and teaching bring to us in regard to His 
meaning for us, when we stand face to face 
with death? That grim specter that fills the 
world with sorrow and dread; has not he 
been met and robbed of his terrors? In no 
words has Jesus been more explicit and assur- 
ing, than in those in which He tells us that 
death cannot defeat His purposes, or dash 
our hopes. "He that believeth in me shall 
never die." One may go through the 
shadowy portals we call death, yes, but into 
the glorious fullness of life eternal. That 
were a great thing to believe if it had been 
simply said by one so worthy of credence as 
the Teacher of Galilee but when He Himself 
passed through death and on that first Easter 
morning became "the firstfruits of them that 
sleep," what greater surety can we ask? Is 
Paul saying too much when he declares that 
as we have borne the image of the earthly, 
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly? 
Nay ! if you have ever studied that 15th chap- 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 7:5 

ter of 1st Corinthians, the glad yet solemn 
message of our burial service, you have seen 
how the great Apostle — with his eyes upon 
the Christ of history and the Christ of expe- 
rience alike — has written out the innermost 
meaning of faith as it concerns the vital union 
oi Christ with those who are His. Nothing 
can touch it, much less break it. Nor is there 
in it merely the promise of immortality of 
soul. "We shall be clothed with that body 
which is from heaven, and which is suited to 
heaven's glory and service. In our day- 
dreams of what it all shall be, the imagination 
falls back baffled and impotent. It is not yet 
made manifest what we shall be. This only 
do we know, "that, if he shall be manifested, 
we shall be like him ; for we shall see him even 
as he is." 

Let me now ask you to look back for a mo- 
ment over thi way we have come. As to the 
Christ of history we believe that in the Gos- 
pels we have a true record of what He said 
and did, and when we come to study the spir- 
itual import of those facts as it has been set 
forth in what His life revealed, the Apostles 
taught, and the experience of an innumerable 
company of believers has confirmed, we find 
that He is to us the living revelation of a holy 
and loving God, the means whereby we gain 



74 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

God's forgiveness, the motive power of a 
spiritual life, and the surety of our everlast- 
ing life in the glory of the resurrection state. 
If all that be true (and if it be not, then the 
New Testament is not true), what of such a 
question as — Was Jesus merely a man? 
There seems to me to be little room for it. 
All through His earthly life the divine shines 
through the sinlessness of His nature, and 
the work He has been doing ever since He 
ascended on high is Godlike and only God- 
like. It is unquestionably true that the Scrip- 
tures are not to teach us metaphysics, and 
a man's metaphysical conceptions have little 
to do with his salvation. Whoever believes 
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and by belief I 
mean committing himself unreservedly to 
His Spirit and service, shall be saved even 
though all his intellectual conceptions do not 
rise to the requirements of a given creed, but 
the great Church of all ages has been true to 
the spiritual teachings of the New Testament 
and to the realities of its best experience in 
calling Jesus Lord, and giving Him the ex- 
alted place of Deity. 

I have in all this said nothing of the teach- 
ings of the second coming. It is a subject 
sufficient for an hour by itself. It is enough 
to say that the hope of the world is in this. 



CONCERNING JESUS CHRIST 75 

There is a form of it which is pessimistic, and 
it seems to me to dishonor Christ. Is it a 
perverted vision which sees Him in the dis- 
tant years as the Lord of China, and of India, 
and of dark, degraded Africa? Are the 
200,000,000 of the Mohammedan world to 
have no other light than that which comes 
from the pages of the Koran, and the dreary 
formalism of the mosque? Are we ourselves 
to work out no sane, social Christianity that 
shall make more vital the brotherhood of 
man? Coming? Is that the question? Yes. 
— In every heart that through Him finds its 
way into the Kingdom of God, in all the so- 
cial unrest that is reaching out for His solu- 
tion of its pressing problems, in every mis- 
sionary enterprise that wins for Him dis- 
ciples from the darkness of superstition and 
a mistaken faith, and at last, when all is done 
that can be done, — when every enemy has 
been put under His feet — in the last final 
scene of earth's redemptive history. 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 

• BY GEORGE BLACK STEWAKT 

1. What we believe concerning the Bible is 
largely affected by two influences: by our 
training and by our own experience. The 
Bible is not a new book to us. From our in- 
fancy we have been familiar with its pages. 
We have listened to its stories at our mother's 
knee ; we have committed to memory its verses 
to gain some coveted prize or to atone for 
some departure from rectitude ; we have been 
instructed from its pages by parents, teach- 
ers, pastors ; have been exhorted, warned, ad- 
monished by those who sought our welfare 
and who wisely or unwisely enforced their 
own words with words from Holy Writ. We 
have seen doctrines buttressed and doctrines 
overthrown by texts cleverly chosen and skill- 
fully used. Thus in many ways we have been 
made daily acquainted with the teaching and 
use of the Bible. 

It is difficult for us to imagine the first im- 
pression the Bible would make upon one who 
reads it for the first time and to whom it 
79 



80 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

comes as an entirely new book. In a way we 
may have this experience for ourselves if in 
our reading of it we endeavor to divest our 
minds of all former notions about the book 
and its teachings and yield ourselves to it 
that it may make its own fresh impression 
and unaided tell its own story. In point of 
fact, however, the most of us retain far on 
into life and perhaps to its close that feeling 
toward the Bible which we received through 
our early training. 

There is another influence which, especially 
in these days, is doing much to determine 
men's attitude toward the Bible, and that is 
what I have called experience. By this term, 
I mean that bundle of influences which deter- 
mine our intellectual and religious atmos- 
phere to-day, some of them distinctly secular 
and apart from the Bible, and some of them 
quite religious and growing out of our own 
personal study of the Bible. 

These two influences may work together or 
they may oppose each other, but they are both 
at work upon all of us who care to give any 
attention to this book. For example, if I 
have been taught that, since the Bible, an in- 
spired book, says the world was made in six 
days of twenty-four hours each, it was there- 
fore made within those time-limits; and, if 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 81 

my knowledge of modern science convinces 
me that it was not thus made, these two in- 
fluences do not tend to affect me in the same 
way toward the Bible. Or, if I have been 
taught that the Bible says God always 
answers prayer, and if in my experience I 
find that he does not, I am affected differently 
by training and by experience. 

Now as men usually, and properly too, hold 
more tenaciously to what they have learned 
for themselves than to what they have been 
told by others, this conflict between teaching 
and experience makes against the teaching 
about the Bible, and all too frequently against 
the Bible itself. If we simply reject what we 
have been taught about the Bible, we will 
doubtless form new views about it which will 
harmonize with our experience and still pre- 
serve for us our reverence and faith in its re- 
ligious teaching. This is what many of us 
have done and are doing, to our own peace of 
mind and spiritual profit. If we so confuse 
our early training about the Bible with the 
book itself, as to reject the book along with 
the teaching about it, then we are quite adrift, 
neither accepting its doctrine nor seeking its 
guidance. It is just in this region of con- 
flict between what we have been taught about 
the Book and what we are learning for our- 



82 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

selves in the school of life, that most of the 
interest concerning the discussion about the 
Bible lies. It is this conflict that starts most 
of the questions that men are asking to-day 
about the Bible. It is my firm conviction that 
these questions can be answered so as to allow 
us to retain, on the one hand, our reverence 
for the Scripture and our faith in its doc- 
trine, and on the other hand, our intellectual 
integrity in the presence of the facts and 
truths of life and the world. I am fully per- 
suaded that we can harmonize a doctrine 
about the Bible and the accepted facts of life 
without sacrificing either its high character 
or our intellectual honesty and moral sin- 
cerity. 

2. My belief in the Bible is secondary to 
my belief in God. 

God is the starting point in all religious 
thinking and life, as he is the beginning and 
end of all things. The primary question for 
a man is not whether he believes the Bible 
but whether he believes God. To get right 
with him, not to get right with the Bible is 
the first duty of man. There must be no con- 
fusion in our thought here. Yet there is any 
amount of confusion just at this point. Some 
identify man's relation to God and the Bible 
so completely as to say that one cannot be a 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 83 

Christian unless he accepts the Bible as an 
inspired book, or, that in becoming a Chris- 
tian one must begin by believing what the 
Bible has to say upon Christian belief and 
practice. 

This is not to put the first thing first. This 
first obligation of every man is met not by 
accepting a Book but by faith and repent- 
ance. Every man is to be told that he is to 
forsake his sin and turn unto God, not that 
he is to believe the Bible. Important as is 
the Bible and significant as is its place in the 
Christian thought and life, yet it is not first. 
We are to allow no man to think that it is. 
Get right with God, and then you are in a 
position of advantage to adjust yourself 
properly to the Bible. The fact that you do 
or do not believe the Bible in no way releases 
you from this primary duty. Our belief in 
the Bible does not put it in God's place. 

3. Our belief in the Bible recognizes its 
variety and its unity. 

When we open the Bible we note that it is 
not one book, but sixty-six books. It is a 
library of books of history, biography, lyric 
poetry, epic poetry, drama, gnomic sayings, 
philosophical essays, letters, apocalypses. It 
is the best literature of an ancient people, rep- 
resenting their literary activity during 



84 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

eleven, perhaps sixteen centuries. This va- 
riety in literary form and these centuries so 
full of changes in national life, ideas and 
hopes, are marked by corresponding variety 
in the contents of these books. Each writer 
reflects his age and has his message for his 
age. He speaks the language of his day and 
speaks it so that the men about him may un- 
derstand him and profit by what he says. 
Yet with all this variety there exists a most 
interesting and truly marvelous unity, a 
unity of thought, of moral and religious ideas 
and ideals, of point of view, of spirit and of 
purpose. It is not the unity of uniformity, 
but of harmony and of progress. It must be 
admitted that there is a different moral tone 
in the directions given by Samuel to Saul to 
kill the Amalekites, both old and young and 
to destroy all their possessions because they 
had been inhospitable to Israel, and the re- 
buke of our Lord to his disciples when they 
desired to call down fire from heaven on the 
Samaritan village because they refused to 
receive him. There is a distinctly different 
tone in the Sermon on the Mount and the Law 
spoken on Mount Sinai. Our Lord recog- 
nized the difference in his teaching and that 
of Moses respecting divorce. 
Yet this difference is the difference between 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 85 

the seed and the full corn in the ear. There 
is a progress in doctrine in the Scripture and 
this progress marks the deeper unity. The 
notes struck are different but not discordant. 
The great ideas — God, righteousness, sin, the 
close relations of religion and morality, the 
presence of a kingdom of God — these great, 
dominant ideas are always the same. They 
are not always put with the same force, or 
clearness, but always with the same high 
sense of reality. The God of Genesis is the 
God of Eevelation ; the God of Isaiah, and of 
Hosea, and Paul and of Jesus is one and the 
same. He is more clearly apprehended by 
one than by the others, he shows a different 
side of his character to these different men, 
and yet as we listen to what these books and 
men, so widely separated in time and circum- 
stance, have to say about God, we are im- 
pressed by the fact that they are talking about 
the same high and holy God. Sin is the same 
evil thing in the early and late books. Salva- 
tion to the writers of the Old and the New 
Testaments is a deliverance from sin wrought 
by God for man. This deep, fundamental 
unity touching the essential realities in reli- 
gion and ethics is one of the most impressive 
facts regarding the Scriptures. 

The Church has expressed this sense of the 



86 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

unity of the Bible by binding these books to- 
gether and calling them, THE BOOK. The 
world has recognized this unity by not seri- 
ously seeking to disturb the union of the 
books or seriously assailing the oneness in 
religious and moral character thus fittingly 
expressed. 

This surprising fact of unity in so great 
variety must be explained and it is adequately 
explained by attributing it to the activity of 
the Spirit of God. He presided over this 
mighty movement of thought in the Jewish 
nation and he inspired these men who from 
time to time gave it expression. These great 
and true ideas under his guidance wrought 
themselves into the life and thought of Israel, 
and by the same power they are being 
wrought into the varied thought and life of 
to-day. When these men of old spake of God, 
and of his relation to man and of man's rela- 
tion to him, they spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost. We believe these many 
books are THE BOOK, essentially one book. 

4. We believe the Bible is essentially a 
religious book. 

It contains history, but its value to us is 
not historical. It contains poetry, but its 
value for us is not aesthetical or literary. It 
throws much light upon the philosophical, the 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 87 

scientific, the social knowledge of the cen- 
turies in which its various parts were writ- 
ten, but it is not in these that our interest in 
the Bible lies. We do not conceive that the 
activity of the divine Spirit was concerned 
with any of these subordinate uses of the 
Bible. The unity which he has secured in 
the midst of the great variety of culture, of 
intellectual and spiritual environment, of 
temperament, of character in the case of the 
many writers, is a spiritual unity and has had 
as its end a spiritual result. It is a religious 
book. 

It records a great religious movement, it 
deals with great religious ideas, it aims at 
great religious effects. We therefore come 
wide of the mark, if our interest in the Bible 
exhausts itself in such secondary questions 
as, whether the early chapters in Genesis are 
history or story, or the book of Jonah is a 
history or a parable, or the stories in Daniel 
are narratives of actual incidents or sermon- 
stories narrated for the moral effect, or the 
Song of Songs an allegory or a dramatic 
poem. These matters have their value and 
they are not to be despised. But they do not 
furnish the chief question, nor do they affect 
the chief question. 

The main question for us is, Does the Bible 



88 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

deal with spiritual realities and deal with 
them in a trustworthy way? This is what it 
professes to do, and this is what it does. It 
seizes upon man's fundamental problem, 
How to be reconciled to God? and solves it. 
"Salvation is of the Jews." God is the 
Saviour of men, whether the salvation is con- 
ceived as material prosperity, or political de- 
liverance, or rescue from the wrath of man, 
or pardon of sin, or emancipation from its 
power. Man is the one who makes the break 
with God, and man keeps up the separation. 
God is ever seeking to effect a reconciliation 
with man; he exhausts the resources of the 
divine power to persuade men to trust him, 
to love him, to enthrone him. It is a long, 
tedious, disheartening struggle between God 's 
love and grace and patience and man's wil- 
fulness and selfishness and lust. God never 
gives over the struggle, but by Voice and 
Vision, in special providence and the great 
on-going of events, through priest and 
prophet, to individuals and nation, he reveals 
himself as men are able to bear it. Step by 
step through disappointing reactions man 
moves to higher ground, to brighter light. 
God in his search for man, and man in his 
seeking after God find each other more and 
more perfectly. 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 89 

It is a great spiritual history, wrought out 
in the life of man and of the world, and the 
Bible gives us the record of it with such 
sweep of vision, with such minuteness of de- 
tail, with such accuracy of description, as to 
make its story utterly trustworthy. 

The center and charm and worth of it all 
is Jesus Christ. He is the consummate rev- 
elation of God. He is the ideal man. In 
him God, the Saviour, and man, the saved, 
unite. To know him is to know God. To 
become like him is to become a perfect man. 
He completes the story of the old dispensa- 
tion and gives it its significance. He begins 
the story of the new dispensation and gives 
it its power. He is the light which lighteth 
every man. He shines in all the past, the 
present, the future for men to guide them in 
the path of life. He is anointed of God and 
received of men as the one Mediator between 
God and man. He is the prophet, priest and 
king, of whom all others are but symbols. 
He is the reality. Without this reality they 
lose their value. Without Jesus Christ, 
foreshadowed in the Old Testament, revealed 
in his life-history and continuing power in 
the New, the Bible would lose its charm and 
its value. For after all is said, it is because 
of Jesus that the Bible is the Book of Books. 



90 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

He is its authentication. He creates and 
perpetuates its influence. It stands or falls 
with him and not he with it. 

It is because it brings him to view of our 
mind and heart, because it makes God in 
Christ real to us, because it opens to us vis- 
ions of the unseen realities of the world and 
of life, that the Bible is for us more than a 
record of revelations, is in fact itself a rev- 
elation. In it we find the things of character, 
in it we come close to God and he comes 
close to us, in it we find the pathway of 
peace, of glorious and triumphant redemp- 
tion, in it we find God in Christ reconciling 
the world unto himself. 

It is the high-water mark of man's ethical 
and religious thinking. Nowhere else do we 
find such exalted spiritual conceptions. No 
other set of men ever attained to these 
heights. No other men have ever gone be- 
yond them. Men are not writing to-day the 
way the men wrote in the Bible. "Whatever 
may be the surprises of the future, Jesus 
Christ will never be surpassed." He stands 
at the summit of human life. And he carries 
with him to that exalted height the Holy 
Bible. It enjoys with him the unapproach- 
able eminence. So long as he abides the chief 
among ten thousand, the one altogether 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 91 

lovely, the Saviour and Lord of men, so long 
will the Bible maintain its preeminence in the 
religious life of the world. In him the word 
of God is yea, and amen forever. The in- 
carnate Word validates and guarantees the 
written word. So long as we have no fear 
for his preeminence we need have none for 
its preeminence. 

5. We believe the Bible is a great creative 
force. 

It goes without saying that the Bible in 
its Old Testament had a prodigious influence 
among the Jews and in the Old and New 
Testaments has even a vaster influence 
among Christians. It has never been a dead 
book. It has created a civilization. It is the 
living force at the center of a regenerated hu- 
manity. It has given birth to the noblest lit- 
erature in the history of every people to 
whom it has come. It has unique power for 
quickening dead souls, for purifying corrupt 
lives, for converting beaten men into con- 
querors, and stricken spirits into those that 
are filled with hope and joy, for finding in the 
darkest spots of the heart a home for the 
brightest light of heaven. It goes throughout 
the earth as a great and living power, sub- 
duing the passions of men, banishing their 
hate, beating the swords into plowshares, 



92 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

emancipating the slaves of man's power, his 
greed, his Inst, supplanting other ethical and 
religious books and teachers and systems, 
causing the desert to blossom as the rose and 
the mountain top to be fertile as the valley. 

It is not for us to say that this tremendous 
creative power of the Bible in the heart and 
in society is due to it as a book or as a liter- 
ature. It is not maintained that these mar- 
velous results follow where it is received 
and read as history, or philosophy, or poetry, 
or even as the mere record of a great peo- 
ple's great religious life. Indeed, there is 
much reason for us to think that the Bible 
received as history or biography or poetry or 
proverb, even though it be buttressed in the 
most rigid theory of inspiration has no crea- 
tive or re-creative power beyond other litera- 
ture. This unique power is due to its unique 
character as a veritable revelation of God to 
man. Jesus Christ makes this book omnipo- 
tent. God here speaks the word of life. The 
man, the men, who cry out to Jesus, "Lord, 
open thou my eyes that I may see wondrous 
things in thy law"; who stretch out their 
hands to God, blindly groping in the dark, if 
haply they may find him, these and men like 
them are the ones to whom the Bible comes 
as a great light, whose feet it guides in the 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 93 

way of life. As is said of the Master, so it 
may be said of it, "Where meek souls receive 
it, it enters in." Here, in the sphere of the 
spirit, the sphere where character is formed, 
where God and man meet, where the unseen 
realities exist and are revealed and are po- 
tent, is the sphere of the Bible's tremendous 
power. 

6. It is the Book of our religion. 

Christianity is not the religion of a book, 
but a religion with a book. The religion has 
created the book, and the book widens and 
enhances the force of the religion. It has 
been a most valuable instrument in the hands 
of the disciples of Jesus for extending his 
kingdom and for bringing men into the 
knowledge and fellowship of him. It is one 
of the greatest gifts of our Faith to the 
world, and in turn it is one of the greatest 
means for the propagation of the faith. It 
is born out of man's profoundest religious 
experiences, when the Spirit of God speaks 
most plainly to him. It ministers to man's 
profoundest religious experiences, and finds 
him in the deepest recesses of his life where 
God alone deals with him. 

It is this finding power of the Bible that is 
its highest authentication to our hearts. 
When we open its pages, somehow its ines- 



94 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

sage of conviction for sin, of offer of salva- 
tion, of comfort in sorrow, of fellowship with 
God, of part in the heavenly glory and 
blessedness, goes to our heart as no other 
message has the power to do. "It finds me in 
the chamber where I sit alone. It finds me 
out in my sin when I fain would be let alone ; 
it reproaches me till I go out to hide my 
tears, though I do not want to leave the mirth 
and song of my sinful pleasure; it makes a 
coward of me, and I shake in my shoes, 
though I am for setting my face as a flint in 
the path of sin, and hardening my joints as 
iron. It searches me thoroughly and re- 
veals me to myself." It is a candle of the 
Lord, seeking out the dark places of my 
soul. It is a rod of God, correcting me in 
my folly. It is a staff of the Lord strength- 
ening me in my weakness. It is a balm of 
the Lord, healing my sickness and my hurt. 
With unerring skill it finds me, reproves, re- 
bukes, exhorts, guides, and cheers me. It 
doth abundantly evidence itself to my heart 
to be the Word of God to me. 

Whether all parts are equally inspired, and 
whether all parts have the same authority, 
are questions for debate among those who 
fancy such academic questions. They have 
small practical value, even to those who hold 



CONCERNING THE BIBLE 95 

the stiffest theory of verbal inspiration. 
Practically only those parts of the Bible are 
a Jiving' Word of God to us, which find us in 
our inner life. Those are the parts which we 
love to read, those are the parts which ter- 
rify, comfort, strengthen, help us. Those 
are the parts that our copy of the Scriptures 
opens to, if they are familiar, or that flash 
out with new light and power, if they are dis- 
covered by us. Those are the inspired Word 
of God, which is profitable for doctrine, for 
reproof, for correction, for instruction in 
righteousness, that we may be men of God, 
perfect and thoroughly furnished unto every 
good work. 

Much more might be said about our Chris- 
tian belief concerning the Bible, and it is of 
such high value, that it may fairly be ques- 
tioned whether it rather than what has been 
just said ought not to have been uttered. 
But I am not prepared to admit that a truer 
purpose to enthrone the Bible might have in- 
spired the utterance. My belief in the Bible 
leads me with all urgency to call men to re- 
pentance toward God and faith in Jesus 
Christ. It leads me to say to all men, the 
first thing for you to do is to get right with 
God, to get as close to him as you can, to fol- 
low the best light you have, to surrender 



96 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

yourself to him, to trust him to give you more 
and still more light. Your only hope of sal- 
vation and peace and heaven is in God. 
Turn to God. My belief in the Bible im- 
pels me to urge all men to read and study its 
pages, to open their hearts to its sweet in- 
fluences, to entrust themselves to its guidance 
in their journey along the perilous road of 
life, to test their doctrine by its doctrine and 
to test their lives by its counsel. 

My belief in the Bible fills me with utter 
calm and security in the midst of all the strife 
of tongues and the assault of men upon it or 
upon the religion out of which it has been 
born. It is an anvil which has worn out 
many hammers and will wear out many more. 
Let men scrutinize its pages, test its state- 
ments, discredit our knowledge about its 
origin, its contents, its authority, yet I have 
no sleepless hours or disturbed dreams about 
its value, its truth or its power. It is a living 
book, it reveals a living Saviour and Lord, 
it ministers to needy souls a living Gospel. 



CONCEENING MAN 



CONCERNING MAN 

BY ALLEN MACY DULLES 

Upon this planet, and only upon this 
planet, so far as we know, there walks a 
creature who calls himself man. He alone 
can name himself. Other animals must come 
to him for their names, for he alone has the 
power of abstract thought. He alone can 
communicate thought through words. 

Whence this man is, and whither he shall 
go, and what he is, are questions which have 
occupied and even distressed man from the 
beginning of self -consciousness. 

" Who'll tell me my secret, 
The ages have kept; 
The fate of the man child, 
The meaning of man. 

u Out of sleeping a waking, 
Out of waking a sleep; 
Life, death overtaking, 
Deep underneath deep." 

King Edwin, of the Saxons, gathered the 
wise men of Northumbria to have their opin- 
99 



100 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

ion of the Christian religion. "So seems the 
life of man," burst forth the aged ealder- 
man, "As a sparrow's flight through the 
hall when one is sitting at meat in winter- 
tide, the warm fire on the hearth, the icy rain 
storm without. The sparrow flies in at one 
door and tarries for a moment in the light 
and heat of the hearth fire, and then flying 
forth from the other vanishes into the dark- 
ness whence it came. 

"So tarries for a moment the life of man 
in our sight. If this new teaching tell ns 
aught, let us follow it." 

Concerning the origin of man, as an ob- 
ject of science, and his physical ancestry, we 
have no need to inquire. If science can in- 
form us as to how God created man, we cer- 
tainly shall gratefully accept such informa- 
tion. We have no fear of the doctrine of 
evolution. 

Since we see man evolved from the infant 
year by year before our eyes, from the insig- 
nificant, ignorant, unintelligent creature, to 
the man of fully developed powers, we need 
have no religious apprehension if the de- 
velopment of the race has had a correspond- 
ing history. We know not how man is made. 
Science has not spoken its last word. The 
doctrine of Darwin has been greatly modi- 



CONCERNING MAN 101 

fied, and is likely to be still further modified; 
and the crude notion of evolution, as a mere 
unfolding in endless process, may be sup- 
planted by some new hypothesis. 

So far, however, as science speaks with 
unanimity, its account of man's origin is 
favorable to man's loftiest thought of him- 
self. All that science can say concerning 
man's origin does not tend to lessen him in 
our estimation. For science itself, in its 
best advocates, assures us that this creature, 
man, is the end toward which the whole 
creation has been groaning and travailing 
in pain. 

Man stands at the end of the whole cosmic 
process ; and evolution has reached, as Fiske 
tells us, its practical end in the formation of 
man. Henceforth, all the differentiation will 
take place within man in his spirit, and not 
in his physical form. 

The fancy of some philosophers that man 
has had an antecedent existence is unprova- 
ble. That 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar," 

is a poet's dream, not fact. It is more im- 
portant for us to place this man in the realm 



102 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of animate things. To what class does he be- 
long? Shall he be placed within or beyond 
the animal? 

On his physical side, science places man 
among the animals. His bodily structure is 
similar to that of the vertebrate animals. 
He is one of the Mammals and as such, close 
of kin to all the mammalian order of Pri- 
mates. 

We may not even affirm that he is the most 
highly specialized of his group. 

Other creatures far exceed man in their 
physical strength, in swiftness of motion, in 
keenness of vision, in the development of 
their senses, in the perfection of their in- 
stincts and their ability to realize the ap- 
parent ends of their existence. 

The lily of the field, our Saviour says, ex- 
ceeds the glory of Solomon. The fish, which, 
invested with scales of gold and silver, 
flashes through the water, has an outward 
beauty man cannot show. The skylark which 
goes with music in its warbling throat up to 
heaven's gates, at eventide, excites the poet's 
envy. 

And yet, even physically regarded, man 
has his own nobility; and when seen in the 
fullness of his strength and beauty he is not 
mean, among the noblest of God's creatures. 



CONCERNING MAN 103 

And, in one respect at least, man physically 
exceeds all other creatures. 

The human hand, as Aristotle long ago 
noted, is a marvelous possession, which dis- 
tinguishes man from all other creatures and 
exalts him above them. By means of it he 
can gain an ascendency over every other 
living thing. With it, he can strike his prey 
afar off. With it, he can fashion and form, 
construct and build. 

But, man's place in nature cannot be ascer- 
tained by the study of his body. The most 
distinctive part of man is his reason which 
may be spiritualized. Nor is the reason but 
a physical manifestation. 

The bold statement that the brain secretes 
thought, as the liver does bile, which simply 
expresses the materialistic idea that man's 
thought is nothing but the movement of brain 
tissue, is not an idea which science really en- 
courages. For, as Fiske says, — "It is not 
even correct to say that thought goes on in 
the brain. What goes on in the brain is an 
amazingly complex series of unknown 
molecular movements with which thought 
and feeling are in some way connected not as 
cause and effect, but concomitant." 

In her better, nobler moods, science cannot 
quite be content to leave man among the ani- 



104 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

mals that perish. She may place him within 
this realm, and yet conducts him to the out- 
ermost rim thereof. She takes him by the 
hand, and leads him to the threshold that he 
may gaze out, if sometimes despairingly, 
over the immeasurable inheritance which 
stretches out before him. Science may yet 
tell me more concerning this physical form 
than we now know. But there is no likeli- 
hood that science will ever succeed, nor does 
it want to succeed, in saying that man is 
nothing but matter, perishable dust. 

If science places man seemingly within the 
lower animal world, philosophy certainly ex- 
alts him. He has a superior perfectibility. 
He has superior means of expressing his 
inner life through speech. He has superi- 
ority of a social nature, organizing capacity. 
He has a religious element which, as is now 
universally recognized, is nowhere wanting. 
It is man alone, as philosophy assures us, 
who comes to true self-consciousness. 

Philosophy places man in a lofty place, 
apart. To the philosopher, man is the 
creature of mind. He has reason. It is by 
his intelligence, his power of thought, that 
he excels all other creatures. 

It is true that other animals which he puts 
beneath him can also in some degree think, 



CONCERNING MAN 105 

yet the comparison between the thoughts of 
animals and this man, renders the former in- 
significant, even when compared with the 
lowest of the human race. 

I do not refer to that instinct which is so 
amazing, so indescribably wonderful, in some 
animals, but the connecting of ideas and the 
thinking in abstract terms, of which all men 
are capable, removes man from the lower 
animals. 

The limits of animal thinking are soon 
reached; but there is no limit to the thought 
of man. In his thought he scales the sky, 
and ascends into the heavens by the way of 
the stars. 

Following the thoughts of the great 
Creator, he measures the heavens, and 
weighs the stars in the balance. 

Under his control are the forces of nature. 
They obey his will. They become his serv- 
ants; by means of which he not only has 
himself transported with rapidity from place 
to place, but sends his words traveling to the 
very ends of the earth in a few moments of 
time. 

It is man who refashions the material of 
earth into forms which his own genius sug- 
gests. The marble becomes a thing of 
beauty; the canvas catches the evanescent 



106 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

colors of the sky; and the fading beauty of 
the human face is made a thing of perpetual 
admiration. Out of the quarries of the 
mountains he gathers the materials with 
which to construct the buildings which almost 
defy time in their permanence, and which are 
indicative of the creative talent with which 
his Maker has endowed him. So that 

" Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, 
As the best gem upon her zone; 
And Morning opes with haste her lids 
To gaze upon the Pyramids." 

Man has reason, so that he demands that the 
universe itself shall accord with his reason. 
He has such a reason that what contradicts 
his intelligence, of necessity cannot be. He 
boldly affirms that the universe must be ra- 
tional. He can understand it and its laws. 
He becomes partner with the Creator thereof 
in its comprehension. 

This creature of the dust, as science tells 
us, lifts his thoughts to eternity. The in- 
finite is present in his consciousness, and the 
eternal has place in his speech. His reason 
does not generate the world, but it holds the 
world in his mind with intelligent compre- 
hension. 

He arranges the mixed and multiform im- 



CONCERNING MAN 107 

pressions into a system of thought which he 
boldly affirms represents the real world. 

While the range of reason in man differs, 
from that of the schoolboy to a Pascal, yet 
the difference in the race as a whole does not 
affect our high opinion of mankind, since it 
is not greater from the lowest human being 
to the highest, than in the history of any in- 
dividual from infancy to maturity. 

And if the infant child can be father to the 
man without break, we have no reason to 
say of any man that his reason is other in its 
nature than that of the wisest of men. 

Philosophy affirms reason as essential to 
men, and human reason reaches out after the 
Eternal Eeason. 

It pertains to the nature of man that he 
should seek after God. Although the notion 
of Max Muller and others that man suffers 
from the invisible is sometimes sneered at, 
and met with the assertion that this is an al- 
together modern malady, and that primitive 
man, or natural man, suffers from the visible 
only, yet it is an undeniable fact. 

Strangely enough, those who deny this 
vague feeling to man are pleased oftentimes 
to affirm it in the lower creatures. The dog 
as he bays at the moon, mysteriously affected 
by he knows not what, would certainly sug- 



108 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

gest the possibility that man not only may 
but must, in his earliest condition, experience 
that of which a French philosopher speaks 
when he says, — "Despite myself, the infinite 
torments me." 

It is impossible that man shall not suspect 
God in what lies beyond sense and sight, the 
limits of which he realizes. The very 
thought that man is aware of limitation, has 
in it already the suggestion of the un- 
limited.. 

It cannot be untrue, what Homer said long 
ago, that "All men long for the gods." It 
is no modern want which the psalmist ex- 
presses, — "As the hart panteth after the 
water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee. ' ' 

It is true, what Augustine said, "Thou 
hast made us for Thyself, and we cannot rest 
until we rest in Thee." 

The history of religion, and man has never 
been other than religious, tells us that man 
has always reached out to touch, if possible, 
the hand of God. 

The discontent which is a part of man's 
natural condition, which unless relieved 
issues in profound despair; man's universal 
belief in his own immortality; the endless 
reach of his thought capacity which is never 
satisfied ; the search for the perfect ; and the 



CONCERNING MAN 109 

realization of ideals, — would all tell us that 
the natural man has indeed this longing for 
God. In one of Plato's dialogues Socrates 
says, — "The idea was in his mind. All I 
had to do was to pull it out." 

In some real sense God's spirit is a part 
of man's life. And it is because man feels 
God, as Goethe tells us, "in himself," that it 
is possible to prove His existence. 

The natural man, indeed, may not know 
God, cannot know God without being acted 
upon by God Himself, any more than he can 
know nature without its operating upon his 
senses. 

As Hegel has said, — "The substance of re- 
ligion cannot be brought into a man as any- 
thing new. This would be as preposterous 
as it would be to try to introduce a spirit 
into a dog by letting him gnaw the printed 
scriptures." 

But the philosopher affirms this human 
potentiality of the knowledge of God and 
likeness to Him. Man's spiritual suscepti- 
bilities may be stunted and undeveloped, but 
yet it remains true that l ' every human heart 
is human. And even in savage bosoms there 
are yearnings, strivings, longings, for the 
good they comprehend not." 

We may liken man, as Tennyson does, to 



110 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the aaolian harp, from which music comes 
when smitten by the wind. 

As Endymion needed to be awaked by 
the touch of Selene, so man sleeps till touched 
by the hand, the revelation of God. As the 
mind sleeps and needs to be aroused, so this 
higher strain of human nature may need 
awakening. But, as Goethe says, "Were not 
the eye illuminated, never could it see the 
sun. Dwelt not in us God's own strength, 
never could the divine delight us." 

For man does not gaze with mere animal 
wonder into the heavens, and over the beauty 
of the earth. 

In the depths of his spirit there is a feel- 
ing which Pascal describes when he says, — 
"The depths of space fill me with terror." 

There comes before this man the thought 
of a being — an eternal and infinite being. 
For even the man whom we call natural, is 
never without some thought of God. It is 
only the sophisticated man who is the atheist. 

Philosophy, especially the philosopher who 
has the vision of the poet and the prophet, 
discovers in man more than is known to the 
senses. 

He sees in man the child of a transcen- 
dental world, and finds no difficulty in the 
assurance that he is made in the image of 



CONCERNING MAN 111 

God, after His likeness; that man is the child 
of God. 

Nor will the philosopher be driven away 
from the belief that man's reason is of divine 
origin, by the frightful contrasts which life 
presents. 

It is true that the human family contains 
its weaklings, as well as its heroes strong in 
mind and body. 

Intellectually, man may be a Newton, a 
Socrates, or a pitiable idiot, incapable of con- 
trolling his thoughts. He may rise morally 
to the height of a John Howard, or descend 
to the depths of drunken licentiousness. 

Over against a John, may be set a Judas. 
Spiritually, he may rise to the heights of St. 
Paul or St. Francis, or descend to the depths 
of the fool, who will not believe there is any 
God. 

Some seem incapable of seeing any other 
than the degenerate man. One of the last 
sentences of Voltaire was, — "Strike out a 
few sages, and the crowd of human beings is 
nothing but a horrible assemblage of un- 
fortunate criminals." 

And Frederick the Great said in a cynical 

mood, — "I know the damned race too well." 

Yet low as man may sink, he bears with 

him some marks, even if in ruins, of the 



112 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

Maker whose glory lie was made to manifest, 
as well as to enjoy. Goethe (Faust) says 
that man uses his reason only to become more 
beastly than the beasts. Yet still his very 
depth of degradation witnesses to the height 
whence he is fallen. This fall is due to the 
fact that reason has not continued to grow 
steadily toward the spiritual ideal. The 
reason as such has grown, but not in char- 
acter nor quality. 

It is a reason which has continued to be, 
or become, earthly, carnal, sensual, devilish. 

Let us try to understand what we mean 
when we speak of man as he is by nature. 
That is natural which expresses outwardly 
what is within, rather than that which is 
brought within from without. 

The child is natural, as compared with the 
artificialness of the man of the world. The 
wood is natural when it has not been 
changed by the hand of man. The scene is 
natural which abides as it was before man 
exercised upon it any of his own thought and 
imagination. 

When a thing is what it is by growth from 
within, rather than by any kind of making 
from without, we call it natural. And yet, the 
effort to draw any distinction between the 
natural man and any other man, is not easy. 



CONCERNING MAN 113 

Do we mean thereby, the uneducated, the 
uncivilized, the uncultured man? In this 
sense it would be impossible to find any 
natural man, that is, any man altogether un- 
affected by educating influences, because the 
man who may be imagined to exist in the 
state of nature must exist in absolute soli- 
tariness, and cannot be regarded as being 
any more truly man for such solitary life 
and growth. 

Indeed, man is not man until he lives in 
social relations; until there is some realiza- 
tion of moral duties. And it is impossible 
to find any man on the face of the earth al- 
together devoid of religious emotions, or even 
theological opinions. 

To find such an imaginary creature we 
would have to go lower even than the lowest 
of barbarians. 

The word has meaning as it distinguishes 
natural from spiritual. 

The man by nature is contrasted with the 
man as he is by grace. Here, indeed, may be 
found a positive distinction, because there is 
implied the second birth. It is not with this 
denied that the natural man is also the child 
of God, who is appointed heir of all things. 
This natural man is chosen of God — chosen to 
inherit the Kingdom of God. This natural 



114 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

man comes under the influence of God, so 
Tertullian speaks of the "naturally Chris- 
tian," and Paul does not deny to him all 
knowledge of God. 

Never this side of death is man anything 
else than the modified nature with which he 
enters life. 

So that even as the uneducated man is not 
distinct from the cultured man by nature, 
neither is the spiritual man a different being 
from the natural man. These words have 
only relative significance. The flesh be- 
comes life and soul, and the soul becomes 
spirit. 

When you look at a watch, you may affirm 
that it keeps good time or bad time. It may 
have a silver or a gold encasing. It may be 
wound up to run for a day, or possibly for a 
year. But it never ceases to be the thing 
you call a watch. 

The natural man was not created perfect. 
The perfection of the natural man is the spir- 
itual man. 

The first Adam was made in the image of 
God. But so is every newborn infant. And 
the statement concerning the original man 
means no more than that man started on a 
career which has likeness to God as its cul- 
mination. 



CONCERNING MAN 115 

Innocent man was, but not positively holy. 
The older Christian theology presented us 
with an original man who, in the state of in- 
tegrity was free from sin, holy and upright. 

But this cannot be regarded as meaning 
that man was perfect. The stately figure 
who in the "Paradise Lost" of Milton walks 
through the Garden in Eden is more the crea- 
ture of his imagination than of fact. 

Man was not created at the goal, but on 
the way to the goal. The making of man 
into the divine likeness is the product of 
God as a racial experience, and as the pro- 
gressive work in each man. 

Adam is a purely representative creature 
setting forth a fact of the first man. We are 
not asked to believe that the Almighty in hu- 
man form took a mass of clay, and having 
fashioned it into human form, breathed into 
it his own breath. 

But the Adam of Genesis is the first man, 
as Paul tells us, of the earth, earthy; far 
away from the second Adam, — Christ Jesus, 
of heaven, heavenly. 

What Paul tells us concerning Adam can 
mean little, if anything, else than that Adam 
represents the natural man, as over against 
the spiritual man ; represents man while still 
under the control of a physical nature before 



116 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the spiritual gains ascendency and complete 
triumph. 

The Adamic nature, as Paul tells us, needs 
to be changed by the Spirit into the likeness 
of Christ. It is this emergence from the nat- 
ural to the spiritual world which makes sin 
both possible and actual. The natural man 
becomes and is the sinful man, when the nat- 
ural man wills not in harmony with the spir- 
itual world into which he is born. The nat- 
ural man is to become spiritual. The natural 
is "by nature the child of wrath," as Paul 
says, when man continues to be "natural," 
when he should be "spiritual." 

Man is a sinner because, and so far as, he 
wills not that which is God's will concerning 
him as made to be like Himself. Man sins 
because, and as, he refuses to emerge from 
the lower natural to the spiritual life. 
"Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." To be 
unspiritual, to be natural, is sin for man. 
As Paul tells us, without law there is no sin. 
Therefore, man becomes a sinner and is such 
by nature, because this new light, this new 
truth, this new spirit, finds him in volitional 
subjection to the lower system of desires 
which prevail in the animal world. 

Man is naturally then, a sinner, because 
God's law and spirit find him dwelling in 



CONCERNING MAN 117 

the lower order of things. Every man's na- 
ture furnishes the material disobedience of 
God's will, but there is no sin until there is 
the conscious disobedience of God's command- 
ment. 

There is no sin in eating fruit, but there 
is sin in eating the forbidden fruit. 

When the old / which has known no other 
law than itself, comes to know a higher law 
than self and is not willingly subject to it, 
then man becomes a sinner. 

The sinner is not merely one who lives on 
the flesh plane, but one who does so against 
the call of God and His spirit. When man 
prefers to dwell in the kingdom of darkness, 
this is sin. 

Is man by nature totally depraved? This 
is a question of purely academic interest, and 
involves a physical notion of sin. 

Sin cannot be regarded quantitatively. 
Nevertheless, there was ground for the old 
statement, inasmuch as it must be said that 
the self is total in all its volitions. And it 
is the total nature that wills either the good 
or the bad. That is, the evil volition is a 
manifestation of the total nature. 

Does man inherit a corrupt nature? We 
must answer again, yes, and no. Every man 
is born with a physical nature which has in 



118 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

it the possibilities of transgression. So far, 
man inherits a corrupt nature. 

Man's nature is corrupt, and he is an ob- 
ject of the divine wrath, so far as he wills to 
do those things which pertain to the nature 
which is below the region in which God's will 
is done. 

Man's continuance as carnal is his sin. 
This, because man wills it. This is the Fall, 
when the natural man endowed with reason, 
conscious of God's will, remains on the lower 
level of the natural. 

It matters not whether man be on a higher 
or lower range of the natural, the natural man 
is emnity against God, because God wills 
that the natural be spiritual, under dominion 
of the laws of the spirit world. 

Man emerges, like Lazarus from his grave, 
with his graveclothes on him, to a new life. 
Man's spirit is born into this spirit world 
with the flesh volitions present with it, but 
there is with this birth the power to consent 
to the things of God and the power to will 
His will, that is the ends of the Spirit. The 
question concerning the freedom of man's 
will, whether in the state of nature or the 
state of grace, is a confused and confusing 
question. 

It were well to remember that man has 



CONCERNING MAN 119 

no will, but he wills. Man is a willing, a 
self-directing person. He does not will with 
a will; he wills. The incipiency of self-direc- 
tion is found at the beginning of animate life. 
At first, this is but instinct. It becomes self- 
conscious and rational in man. Man not only 
wills, he knows that he wills. And he knows 
what he wills. 

Man knows that there were other ends 
which he has not willed. (I do not say which 
he might have willed, because this hypothet- 
ical volition never takes place.) "We cannot 
enter into a discussion of the will, whether 
it be determined or undetermined. It is 
enough to say: man wills this or that end, 
whatever may be the relation of this willing 
to his desires and appetencies. Man wills 
and he knows he wills. Whether he wills 
freely or not is, perhaps, an unsolvable prob- 
lem, depending much on the significance of 
the word free. 

To will divine ends, these ends (com- 
mandments they become) must be seen 
by man, must be recognized as good. 
So far as man (the will) succeeds in bring- 
ing all the various volitional tendencies 
into subjection to this revealed end, God's 
purpose, so far is man free from sin, but so 
far as man wills the non-spiritual, merely 



120 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the natural, he is a sinner, with the possible 
end before him of final destruction. 

What Paul calls the "sarx" is not to domi- 
nate man. The self of the spirit is not to 
obey the law of the flesh. This is to be a sin- 
ner, with the sure destiny awaiting one of the 
loss of the spirit, in the spiritual death of a 
flesh life. This death is not like that condi- 
tion before I was spiritually born, in the in- 
nocency of the animal life, in the innocency 
of the child life, in the innocency of an Adam, 
but with the spirit still conscious of a lost glo- 
rious estate, enslaved to the baser power. 

It is this calamity which Paul contemplates 
with such a mortal dread in his letter to the 
Eomans. The danger is that the will, the 
self, of man may come under the dominion 
of this, "the flesh." Perfect liberty, Paul 
recognizes, is not immediately attainable. The 
reason why a person as Paul, can approve 
one end and yet do what is away from this 
end, is because the end which is consented 
to as good is not so strongly desired as the 
end which does not meet the approval of the 
moral nature, — this new order of things in 
my mental world. "Which of these is the 
man's character? What he approves, or 
what he wills? 



CONCERNING MAN 121 

In this divided state there is as yet no 
fixed character. The person is in process of 
formation, with a theoretic possibility before 
it of saying, — as Milton's Satan: "Myself 
am hell." Or as Christ: " Myself am 
heaven." 

The psychic forces of man's nature may 
still voluntarily go after the lower ends, with 
a growing consciousness of disapproval. 

The infant passes on its habits to the child 
and the ' ' Child is father of the man, ' ' though 
the days may not be "joined each to each in 
natural piety." 

The fact that man can approve one thing 
and do another tells of the presence of a 
power which represents a higher order of 
things than that to which the natural man be- 
longs. There speaks in this approval the 
voice of this higher order than the individual 
man. This is called conscience. 

This conscience may represent the social 
or moral order of things. It may, in repre- 
sentative persons, who stand far above the 
many, be the voice of the transcendental 
world and God Himself. Thus the true 
prophets, thus supremely Jesus, witness of 
the man who is to be, the man of God. 

The natural man comes within the domain 



122 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of this higher, spiritual influence which al- 
ways must continue with it even though 
offended. 

But this consent to the voice which speaks 
for the superior order of things is not, at the 
first, the equivalent to the volitional direction 
of the self toward it. 

Paul distinguishes between what he wills, 
and what may be done by him. He recog- 
nizes a lower potency, which is active, the 
passions of the flesh and of the mind, the nat- 
ural as over against the spiritual. 

When this acts, it is not he, himself. "It 
is no more I . . . but sin that dwelleth 
in me. ' 9 

That is, Paul here asserts the fact of a 
spiritual enslavement when the I, the ego, 
does not what the super-ego declares good 
and right, when there is a frightful impotence 
of the higher self, the real self before the 
power of the flesh. 

He does not regard this condition as an in- 
nocent one, nor as having in it any promise 
of blessedness. On the contrary, this higher 
voice of his spiritual self, this voice of God, 
the divine imperative commands him, on the 
very peril of his soul, to obey. Failure to 
obey means death, means the continuance un- 
der the domination of his sarx, his flesh. 



CONCERNING MAN 123 

That it is more powerful does not help the 
soul toward release. 

There is in this no excuse justifying fur- 
ther surrender. Who, he cries in his agony 
of enslavement, shall deliver me from the 
body of this death? Where is the one who, 
or that which shall enable my spirit born of 
God and now conscious of either the doom of 
death, death of spirit in the flesh, to escape, 
to rise, to seize its promised destiny, like 
the bird caged which longs for the sun? 

Man may through weakness or despair give 
over hope and redemption, and may give him- 
self up to this dominance of the flesh, but 
sooner or later every soul must cry as Paul 
cried, in an agony which increases as it is 
postponed and unanswered, for deliverance 
from the bondage and corruption of "sin in 
the flesh." 

Salvation is perfect liberty of the self 
through perfect conformity to the will of God. 

When man is what his enlightened con- 
science affirms that he ought to be, what God 
wills him to be, when he attains this his des- 
tiny, he has and is all that is subjectively 
necessary for his salvation. Man is not to be 
de-naturized, but spiritualized. It must be 
true as Tennyson says: 

Then most God-like when most a man. 



124 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

Man is to attain harmony with that ra- 
tional, larger, purer world, the heavenly, the 
beautiful world. As Sidney Lanier says: 

Sweet friends 

Man's love ascends 

To higher and diviner ends 

Than his mere thought comprehends. 

And Dante tells us : 

Heaven round about us wheeling, 
Courts our gaze. 



CONCEENING SALVATION 



CONCERNING SALVATION 

BY HARRY LATHROP REED 

John xiv, 6 : " Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, 
and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the 
Father, but by me." 

"The only port that in the last storm my 
shattered vessel can hope to take, or has any 
desire to take, is that of sovereign mercy;" 
were almost the last words of Dr. John 
Brown, of Edinburgh. His favorite text was : 
"Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus 
Christ." When Dr. Thomas Binney retired 
from his pulpit in London he appropriated as 
the expression of his own deepest convictions, 
the text : ' ' Enter not into judgment with thy 
servant: for in thy sight no man living is 
righteous. ' ' Archbishop Usher died with the 
publican's prayer upon his lips. "With re- 
gard to myself," said William Wilberforce, 
when dying, ' i I have nothing to urge but the 
poor publican 's plea : ' God be merciful to me 
a sinner.' " When Hugo Grotius lay dying 
at Rostock, the minister reminded him of the 
publican's prayer. "That publican, Lord, 
127 



128 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

am I, ' ' said Grotius ; 6 { God be merciful to me 
a sinner," and then he died. The prayer of 
the saints of all ages has been the motto that 
high up among the Alps the Dolomites have 
painted often upon their cottage doors, — 
"Misericordia, Jesu" — Jesus, Saviour of 
men, have mercy/ It is a significant fact. 

The man who could say with all sincerity 
and humility: "As touching the righteous- 
ness which is in the law, blameless;" with 
equal sincerity, describing the same period 
and condition of his life said: "I know that 
in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good 
thing: for to will is present with me, but to 
do that which is good is not. . . . For 
I delight in the law of God after the inward 
man: but I see a different law in my mem- 
bers, warring against the law of my mind, 
and bringing me into captivity under the law 
of sin which is in my members. Wretched 
man that I am! who shall deliver me out of 
the body of this death? I thank God through 
Jesus Christ our Lord." 

These are types of a common experience, a 
consciousness of sin; that is, a consciousness 
of a bondage, or a captivity, or a moral defect 
and impotence calling loudly for deliver- 

* See Expository Times, June, 1900. 



CONCERNING SALVATION 129 

ance, not on the ground of merit or desert, 
but of mercy only. 

Now it is a fact that, historically consid- 
ered, "consciousness of sin is a relatively 
late experience." "Devout souls feel their 
wrongdoing as sin, grieve over their moral 
imperfections as a breach of perfect moral 
union with their supreme Ideal of a worthy 
life" — i. e. God. "The frequency and poig- 
nancy of this consciousness of sin do not de- 
pend on the multitude and magnitude of the 
individual's transgressions." "Thus," the 
psychologist tells us, "the experience is ex- 
plained that those most sensitively consti- 
tuted and highly developed religiously are 
most disturbed by the thought of their own 
wrongdoing. To lack the consciousness of 
sin is no sign of perfection but quite the re- 
verse." Without cant or hypocrisy a Paul 
may call himself the chief of sinners. But 
no man dare call himself the least. 

It is because of this that all the great world 
religions have been religions of salvation. 
They all seek to provide a way for the indi- 
vidual in his search for deliverance, and for 
more perfect union with God. "The way, 
the way!" is the significant phrase of each 
religion. The more devout the seeker, the 



130 .WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

more intensely eager his search for the 
way. — 

u Falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 

That slope through darkness up to God, 

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 

And faintly trust the larger hope." 

That is the experience of the seeker after the 
way. 

Now, one world religion has by its fruits 
and by its victories, proved itself the world 
religion — and preeminently a religion of sal- 
vation, for its founder, from whom it takes 
its name, called himself the Way, because he 
was the truth and the life. It is to his 
claims for himself as Way, attested by those 
who knew him and wrote of him, and still 
more as borne out in the experience of those 
who have tried the Way, that we are to look 
for an expression of that which salvation 
means. 

And all the more must we ever return to 
those conceptions of the way of salvation 
found in Scripture and experience, because in 
the course of the ages the conception has 
developed details of the way so varied and 



CONCERNING SALVATION 131 

so many, tliat they have included objection- 
able and even mischievous features. Sub- 
scription to a particular creed ; adherence to 
a particular organization; worship in a par- 
ticular way ; reception of a particular form or 
rite; these and many others "have been in- 
corporated into the doctrine of the way that 
lies between man and God." Augustine de- 
clares : "A man can have everything outside 
the church — only not salvation; and though 
he thinks he is living a good life, yet for the 
one crime of schism from the church, he will 
not have part in life, but the wrath of God 
abides on the schismatic." 

It is to be remembered that even when we 
are considering the words of Jesus, we are 
considering those few words — out of the 
many that he spoke, (the worldful of books 
of them, had they all been written) which 
through long experience, meditation, preach- 
ing, the Spirit had brought to the remem- 
brance, and kept in the remembrance of those 
who first heard them; and that the mental 
and spiritual needs of the writers, and their 
peculiarities of experience, must have had 
much to do with the memory's choice. Hence 
the various colors of thought, even in the 
Gospel records. 

In the Synoptic Gospels the idea of sal- 



132 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

vation is intimately bound up with that of the 
Kingdom of Heaven. "Salvation," some 
one has said, "is the reverse side of the gos- 
pel of the Kingdom, which was the burden of 
Jesus' preaching." In the Gospel according 
to John, it is Life which is the great word in 
the development of salvation — Life that is 
called eternal, aeonian. 

Jesus says that he came to seek and to 
save that which is lost. His name was to be 
called "Jesus," "for it is he that shall save 
his people from their sins." He says that 
he came to "give his life a ransom for 
many. ' ' And this conception was intimately 
connected with entrance into the kingdom. 
When Jesus said: "It is easier for a 
camel to go through a needle's eye, than for 
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, ' J 
the disciples exclaimed: "Who then can be 
saved?" That was salvation. 

To John, salvation was from death to life, 
and that life was a present, not merely a 
future, reality; and salvation was a present 
spiritual experience. "He that believeth on 
the Son hath eternal life ; but he that obeyeth 
not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath 
of God abideth on him." "He that heareth 
my word, and believeth him that sent me, 
hath eternal life, and cometh not into judg- 



CONCERNING SALVATION 133 

nient, but hath passed out of death into life." 
And when we look more closely at John's 
conception of the nature of this life, we find 
it has two characteristics, illustrated by the 
luminous words "light and love — spiritual 
insight, holy affection." 

The records in Acts, and in the letters of 
the Apostles, give further conceptions of the 
way of salvation. They are not necessarily 
later conceptions than those of the Gospels; 
they are to be placed side by side with them 
— each with its own personal and spiritual 
coloring. "Salvation" is the central theme 
of all the apostolic preaching, and Jesus is 
the Saviour. "Salvation has become almost 
a technical term to sum up all the blessings 
brought by the gospel." Peter sums it all 
up, when he says before the sanhedrin: "In 
none other in their salvation: for neither is 
there any other name under heaven, that is 
given among men, wherein we must be 
saved." 

But the term includes a wide variety of 
detail. Paul says "Christ Jesus came into 
the world to save sinners; of whom I am 
chief." Again: "Much more then, being 
now justified by his blood, shall we be saved 
from the wrath of God." Again: "Unto 
him that was able to save him from death." 



134 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

At Philippi the ventriloquist girl who 
shouted after Paul and Silas had caught their 
phrase: " These men . . . proclaim 
unto you the way of salvation." The Philip- 
pian jailer had caught the phrase: "What 
must I do to be saved ?" "Believe on the 
Lord Jesus," was the answer. But years 
later, writing to these same Philippians, 
Paul's exhortation was: "Work out your 
own salvation . . . for it is God who 
worketh in you." 

Yet again Paul writes: "By grace have 
ye been saved through faith; and that not 
of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of 
works." And James says: "What doth it 
profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath 
faith, but have not works? can that faith 
save him?" "Ye see that by ivorks a man is 
justified, and not only by faith." 

Or take this contrast : "Who, his own self 
bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that 
we, having died unto sins, might live unto 
righteousness," and, "If, while we were 
enemies, we were reconciled to God through 
the death of his Son, much more, being recon- 
ciled, shall we be saved by his life. ' ' Or this : 
"Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, 
now is the day of salvation," and "now is 



CONCERNING SALVATION 135 

salvation nearer to us than when we first be- 
lieved. ' ' 

And in addition to the salvation of the in- 
dividual, Paul thinks of salvation as social — 
and even as cosmic — reaching out to take in 
the universe as a whole — "in hope that the 
creation itself also shall be delivered from the 
bondage of corruption into the liberty of the 
glory of the children of God." 

These illustrations of the varied concep- 
tions of salvation, taken almost at random, 
nevertheless fit into each other and supple- 
ment each other; salvation is deliverance in 
view of the consciousness of sin and of moral 
impotence, in view of the sore need that man 
feels of forgiveness, of reconcilement, of 
help. It is deliverance from sin, from death, 
from the wrath of God, from wrath to come : 
it is a deliverance by a Saviour, through 
faith, through works, of grace: it is a deliv- 
erance of the individual, of society, of all 
creation: it is a deliverance . from the past, 
in the present, and for the future. 

It is this last form of the conception that 
is the most comprehensive: there are three 
salvations, — or rather salvation is threefold. 
First of all it is deliverance from the past — 
from the guilt of sin. It means forgiveness 



136 [WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of sin, reconciliation with God. And second, 
it is deliverance from the power of sin in 
the present. And third, it is deliverance 
from the final result and stain of sin for all 
eternity. 

I. We believe in the forgiveness of sins. 
We believe that salvation in its first and fun- 
damental aspect is forgiveness of sin, and 
reconciliation with God, from whom sin has 
estranged mankind. We believe that Jesus 
Christ is the way of salvation, because first 
of all he is the way to the Father — he is the 
way of forgiveness of sin. We turn to 
the life and example of Jesus ; we turn to his 
words, as they had interpretation and con- 
firmation in the experience of those who heard 
them and followed them out to their logical 
end; and we turn to the experience of all 
those who have sought the Father through the 
Way, Christ Jesus. 

We ground our belief in reconciliation to 
God on some of the facts of Jesus' life and 
teaching, which experience has amply tested. 
In the first place there is forgiveness — simply 
as a fact — without questions of how or on 
what conditions. Jesus has convinced us of 
the reality of forgiveness. He did it by ex- 
amples. Forgiveness is best understood by 
examples. Jesus himself forgave. He was 



CONCERNING SALVATION 137 

always forgiving. And he had much to for- 
give. His friends deserted him, he forgave 
them ; Peter denied him inexcusably, repeat- 
edly, wantonly; Jesus' look of forgiveness 
nearly broke Peter's heart. His enemies 
pursued him, vilified him, condemned him, 
crucified him ; he forgave them unasked, and 
prayed for their forgiveness. 

He claimed to have the authority on earth 
to forgive sins, and he forgave them, and the 
forgiveness was a fact. To the palsied man 
he said, Thy sins are forgiven ; to the woman 
in Simon's house, he said, Thy sins are for- 
given; and their sins were forgiven. 

Further, he was always talking about for- 
giveness as a reality: "Forgive and ye shall 
be forgiven;" "If ye forgive not men their 
trespasses, neither will your Father forgive 
your trespasses;" "Love your enemies 
. . . that ye may be sons of your Father 
who is in heaven." 

And still further he illustrated forgiveness 
by story and parable; by the parable of the 
wicked servant; by the parable of the two 
debtors; and, most wonderful and beautiful 
of all by the story of the lost son, the whole 
glory of which is in the reality of forgiveness. 

That first : Jesus made forgiveness real by 
example and illustration. "Forgiveness," 



138 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

some one has said, "was present and incar- 
nate in him." 

But more : He showed himself the way to 
God by interpreting sin and forgiveness in 
terms of personal pronouns. Forgiveness of 
sin is the forgiveness of the sinner. The sin 
is forgotten, the sinner is forgiven. The 
Psalmist and the Old Testament saints real- 
ized that. They deal very little with sin- 
ners in the abstract, or with sin and forgive- 
ness as mental conceptions. Drummond 
says: "The Psalms will ever be the stand- 
ard work on sin." It never occurred to the 
Psalmist that sin was anything but a personal 
relation to God, or that forgiveness was "im- 
possible, or self -contradictory or immoral. " 
"When he sinned he knew he sinned against 
God." "Against thee, thee only, have I 
sinned, and done that which is evil in thy 
sight." "Have mercy upon me, God, ac- 
cording to thy lovingkindness . . . blot 
out my transgressions." "Bless Jehovah, 
my soul, . . . who forgiveth all thine 
iniquities." And Jesus emphasized and clar- 
ified that conception, and has done it for all 
generations. In this was he the Way to God, 
in that he magnified the personal relationship 
of God to man, and of man to God, and 
turned man's thought to that personal re- 



CONCERNING SALVATION 139 

sponsibility which resulted. And when Jesus 
said: "One of you shall betray me," the 
whole teaching of his life compelled his fol- 
lowers to a personal inspection. Not one of 
them said, " Is it Judas ? Is it Peter ! " But 
each man said, honestly, fearfully: "Is it 
I?" 

And then again we ground our belief in 
forgiveness of sin on the fact of God as Fa- 
ther. And Jesus is the way to the Father- 
hood of God. "Forgiveness is possible if 
God is our heavenly Father." If God is 
love, forgiveness is possible. And we know 
him as love, we know him as Father, be- 
cause Christ has led us to him. He is the 
way. His own relationship to the Father is 
a revelation of the Father. 

And it is here that the story of the Prodi- 
gal Son is such a perfect illustration. If he 
is our Father he is reaching out hands of 
forgiveness from afar. That forgiveness has 
power to reach even to the far country, and 
to draw, out of his misery and sin, the lost 
son back to the waiting Father. "Forgive- 
ness," Frederick Eobertson said, "is the dec- 
laration of the highest name of God — love." 
And such forgiveness is reconciliation. The 
way back from estrangement to reconciliation 
is the way of forgiveness. It is far more 



140 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

than a cancelling of the past — it is the ad- 
mission again of the Father into a life from 
which he had been shut out. To this, Christ 
is the way. "He that hath seen me, hath 
seen the Father." 

And then there is a deeper sense in which 
Christ is the way. There are more than per- 
sonal relations involved, when we sin against 
God. "Forgiveness does present difficul- 
ties to men who dwell mentally among nat- 
ural laws, and in the realm of abstract 
ideas." How can God forgive sins? If 
there is a moral order in the universe ; if God 
is a moral being; if he is infinite in his jus- 
tice, then forgiveness is not a cheap thing. 
It can be no human unconcern that says to 
the penitent offender: "Don't mention it." 
But fortunately for our belief in salvation, 
and for our relation to God, all theories of how 
God can forgive sin, all theories of the atone- 
ment, so-called, are not in themselves the way 
to God. As Dr. Denney says: "The great 
doctrines of the death of Christ as an expia- 
tion for sin, or of the ideas associated with 
such New Testament words as, 'In whom we 
have our redemption through his blood, the 
forgiveness of our trespasses,' — these doc- 
trines are rather the fruit of reflection on for- 
giveness, than the way to experience forgive- 



CONCERNING SALVATION 141 

ness." "The way is Jesus Christ. It is in 
his company that you will learn the possibility 
and the reality of pardon; and you will 
learn these things as you learn all that is 
great and priceless in life, as you learn 
to believe in God, or in the love of your 
mother, in ways too subtle and complicated 
for any doctrinal statement." But this also 
becomes very clear, that forgiveness does 
cost, that it is made possible only through 
a passion of love that can find expression in 
nothing save the tragedy of a tremendous sac- 
rifice. If sin is really abhorrent to God — if 
it is really the blackest thing in the universe, 
then anything that makes God's forgiveness 
of sin cheap and easy, that implies that he 
can forgive merely as man forgives, is an in- 
sult to God and a crime against man. It 
makes that which to man is misery, suffering, 
death, in God's sight a matter of little or 
no concern. It is this great cost of forgive- 
ness that has forever been the convincing ar- 
gument for God's love, and the attracting 
power to the son in the far country — the cross 
of Christ. i i Herein is love, not that we loved 
God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to 
be the propitiation for our sins." The way 
of forgiveness is the way of the cross. And 
when we are led far afield into explanations 



142 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of how and why, we lay ourselves open to the 
charge that Luther once brought against 
Erasmus: "Your thoughts concerning God 
are too human. ' ' 

u For the love of God is broader 

Than the measures of man's mind, 
And the heart of the Eternal 

Is most wonderfully kind: 
But we make his love too narrow 

By false limits of our own, 
And we magnify his strictness 

With a zeal he will not own." 

II. But there is more in salvation than the 
forgiveness of sin, just because there is more 
in sin than its guilt. Sin is a very present 
power. Salvation from the past is forgive- 
ness and reconciliation and restoration. But 
salvation for the present is power to over- 
come power. "If remission of sins stood 
alone," some one has said, "it would leave us 
unsaved." 

Much as Jesus said concerning sin and 
forgiveness, he said even more by word and 
by example concerning a present, active, over- 
coming life. Every man to whom he has ap- 
pealed has felt that reconciliation is but the 
beginning of salvation. Deliverance from 
the guilt of sin is one thing — deliverance 
from its power is another. "A character- 



CONCERNING SALVATION 143 

istic feature of the primitive community of 
Christians," says Harnack, "is that every in- 
dividual in it, even the very slaves, possesses 
a living experience of God." 

The Apostle John possessed it, and his 
Gospel is the expression of what lie found 
Jesus' words to mean — salvation a deliver- 
ance from death to a life. Paul possessed it, 
and the possession explains his words: "If, 
while we were enemies, we were reconciled to 
God through the death of his Son, much more, 
being reconciled, shall we be saved by his 
life." This was the Paul who was appre- 
hended on his way to Damascus, by the 
strong hand of the Lord, who was saved 
from his bondage to the law, to sin and to 
death. Yet after a quarter of a century of 
salvation he writes: "Not that I have al- 
ready obtained, or am already made per- 
fect : but I press on, if so be that I may lay 
hold on that for which also I was laid hold on 
by Christ Jesus." Attainment, perfection, 
the revelation of Christ in him, character 
Christlike, this was that for which he con- 
ceived that he had been apprehended. 

"It takes life to redeem life ; it takes power 
to meet power." That life and that power 
we believe to come through a vital union with 
Christ Jesus, who is the way, because he is 



144 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the life. A mystical union it may seem to 
be, it is none the less real and vital. Jesus 
taught it when he called himself the bread of 
life, the water of life, the vine in which are 
the branches ; when he said: " Ye in me and 
I in you;" "He that hath the Son hath life." 
Paul felt it when he said: "And it is no 
longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me;" 
when he said : i ' For to me to live is Christ ; ' ' 
when he said: "Work out your own salva- 
tion . . • for it is God who worketh in 
you;" when he used that favorite phrase of 
his, so often recurring, ' ' in Christ, in Christ ! ' ' 
By his life and the power of his life, lives 
may be redeemed daily from the power of 
destruction. "To be saved, according to our 
Lord is first of all to be reconciled to God as 
Father, and then to enter upon a life fitted 
to the children of such a Father. ' ' What are 
the characteristics of that life? What are 
the distinctive characteristics of Jesus, which 
separate him from all others? The author 
of "The Fact of Christ" says they are four 
— Purity, Love, Forgiveness, Humility — not 
the only characteristics of the Christlike life, 
but those that are distinctive. Perhaps a 
more comprehensive statement of them is: 
filial dependence on God and devotion to his 
will, and brotherly service. 



CONCERNING SALVATION 145 

There is that side of a saved life that faces 
only toward God our Father. There are vic- 
tories to be won, the struggles which can be 
shared with no human soul; when man can 
come off conqueror only through union with 
him who having been tempted is able to suc- 
cor them that are tempted; who himself was 
made perfect through suffering. "For our 
wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but 
against the principalities, against the powers, 
against the world-rulers of this darkness, 
against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in 
the heavenly places. ' ' Only a present, daily, 
constraining power can save a life from the 
power of sin, save it to filial devotion and 
Godlike purity of heart. And then there is 
the other side of the saved life, that faces 
manward. Its daily expression is service. 
We are saved to serve. "Whosoever would 
become great among you, shall be your min- 
ister; and whosoever would be first among 
you, shall be servant of all. For the Son of 
man also came not to be ministered unto, but 
to minister, and to give his life a ransom for 
many. ' ' The salvation that does not have in 
it that element of service is a misnomer. 
The life that does not serve is not saved. 

It is through this large feature of service 
that we are to look for a salvation that is not 



146 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

individual merely but social — for a kingdom 
of heaven on earth — for a society purified 
and ennobled and illumined till it is worthy of 
the title, The City of God. Call it the Church, 
call it the Communion of Saints, call it the 
Heavenly Kingdom — it is God's ideal only 
when it is society saved. 

III. This is salvation for the present — de- 
liverance from the power of sin. There is a 
third salvation — a third conception of a 
threefold salvation — salvation for the fu- 
ture. It enters largely into our belief. It is 
reserved for the fuller statement concerning 
the future life. To many it has seemed the 
chief element of all. The burden of much 
preaching has been: Flee from a punish- 
ment to come — be saved to a future life. But 
the real emphasis is on the present. "Now 
are we children of God, and it is not yet made 
manifest what we shall be. We know that, 
if he shall be manifested, we shall be like 
him." We shall be saved even from the 
stains of sin, that have been so unescapable 
here. 

We believe in a salvation from the guilt 
of sin ; that is the past. We believe in a sal- 
vation from the power of sin; that for the 
present. For both of them Jesus Christ is 
the way. And we believe in an " inheritance 



CONCERNING SALVATION 147 

incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth 
not away, reserved in heaven for you, who by 
the power of God are guarded through faith 
unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the 
last time. ' ' A saved life — a life of salvation 
— and then more salvation ready to be re- 
vealed — and for it all Christ is the way. And 
to that deliverance of the future we see the 
whole creation looking and moving. "For 
the earnest expectation of the creation 
waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. 
For the creation was subjected to vanity, not 
of its own will, but by reason of him who sub- 
jected it, in hope that the creation itself also 
shall be delivered (saved) from the bondage 
of corruption into the liberty of the glory of 
the children of God." A freed creation! 
The last enemy to be destroyed, — Death. 

' ' the depth of the riches both of the wis- 
dom and the knowledge of God! how un- 
searchable are his judgments, and his ways 
past tracing out! . . . For of him, and 
through him, and unto him, are all things. 
To him be the glory forever. Amen." 



CONCEENING THE CHUECH 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 

BY EDWARD WAITE MILLER 

Colossians i, 18: "And he is the head of the body, 
the church." 

In the Old Roman Symbol, the ancestor of 
our so-called Apostles' Creed, is this state- 
ment: "I believe in the holy Church." 
This earliest rule of faith or baptismal con- 
fession, dating from the latter half of the 
second century, underwent gradual expansion 
and a few centuries later the article concern- 
ing the Church came to read: "I believe in 
the holy Catholic Church." In these words, 
for perhaps 1500 years, western Christendom 
has affirmed its belief in a universal Chris- 
tian community. 

It has always been recognized that belief 
in the Church was a necessary article of 
Christian faith. Religion is a principle of 
association among men, and the religion of 
Christ is, above all others, essentially social. 
No man can live the full Christian life in will- 
ful isolation from his fellows. The spirit of 
brotherhood is its vital breath. In order to 
151 



152 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

become a disciple of Christ, one must recog- 
nize his other disciples. To be his friends, 
we must admit his other friends into our 
friendship. To be his servants, it is required 
that we acknowledge and cooperate with all 
those who like ourselves are striving to do his 
will and advance his kingdom. 

Hence belief in a Christian community is 
an essential part of the Christian faith. 
This Christian community, conceived of as 
a visible organization, we call the Church. 
Because it is a religious community, we speak 
of it as the holy Church. Because we con- 
ceive of all its branches and divisions as con- 
stituting one great religious unit, we call it 
the holy Catholic, that is, universal, Church. 

Eegarded from any point of view, the 
Christian Church is an imposing institution. 
It is venerable with age. No other institu- 
tion — save the family and the state — has 
endured so long. It stands firmly rooted in 
one of the primary human instincts, reli- 
gion. It has been sustained and extended 
by the most uncalculating and heroic devo- 
tion. It has overcome powerful enemies. 
It has survived its own mistakes and disloyal- 
ties. It has made alliance with all the benef- 
icent forces in human society. It has in- 
spired and been ministered to by all the arts. 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 153 

It has directed the development of our civili- 
zation. It has molded the ethical ideals of 
the dominant nations of the world. 

In approaching many an old European 
city, long before you can distinguish any- 
thing else belonging to the city, you see its 
ancient church or cathedral, towering above 
every other structure, dominating the whole 
life of the community. So stands the Chris- 
tian Church in the history of the last fifteen 
centuries. 

And it stands to-day stronger numerically 
and morally than ever before. And it to- 
day gives greater promise than ever before 
of realizing its divine Founder's ideal — of 
bringing the whole world under its beneficent 
influence. Such an institution, whether we 
grant it our personal allegiance or not, com- 
mands our earnest interest, and calls for an 
adequate explanation. 

It is possible to construct a theory of the 
nature and the purpose of the Church as it 
exists to-day, without considering its origin 
or history. But we shall certainly be more 
likely to arrive at a correct conception of 
the genius of the Church if we examine the 
ideals of its Founder and of its first mem- 
bers. 

In the New Testament the word Ecclesia, 



154 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

which has come to be translated Church, oc- 
curs something over a hundred times. 
Though it appears oftenest in the writings of 
Paul, yet it is used by nearly all the other 
New Testament writers. It consequently 
represents a conception familiar to first dis- 
ciples of Christ. 

The word had a history, and its history 
must have largely determined its meaning as 
used by Christ and his followers. Ecclesia 
was the Greek equivalent for a Hebrew word 
meaning either the assembly or congrega- 
tion of the Israelitish people called together 
for some special purpose, or the whole people 
of Israel regarded as a political or religious 
unit. This double meaning — either the na- 
tional assembly or the nation itself — would 
be the significance of Ecclesia to a Greek- 
speaking Jew of the time of Our Lord. To a 
Greek, however, the word would have a more 
restricted meaning. To him it would signify 
a popular assembly of all the citizens of a 
Greek town or city called together by a herald 
to transact public business. 

The writers of the New Testament use the 
word Ecclesia or Church with both its Jewish 
and Greek meanings, but very naturally the 
word gained a peculiar significance of its 
own, when it was applied to the assembly of 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 155 

the followers of Christ in a given locality or 
in the world at large. 

The main thing to be remembered is that 
the word that we translate Church had roots, 
both in Jewish history and in the political 
constitution of the Greek cities. While 
meaning primarily an assembly or congre- 
gation, it had associations, on the one hand 
with the whole people of Israel regarded as 
a religions nnit, and on the other hand with 
the sovereign assemblies of the citizens in 
any Greek municipality, the ' * town-meeting. ' ' 
Such were the notions connected with the 
word Church when it came to be applied to 
associations formed of the followers of 
Christ, 

It is an interesting fact that in the re- 
corded words of Our Lord there are but two 
occasions on which he uses the word Church, 
Ecclesia. The first of these is in his familiar 
words to Simon Peter, who had just confessed 
his faith in him as the Son of God. He said : 
"Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will 
build my church. ' ' In this statement Christ 
discloses the fact that he is to have an Ec- 
clesia, that his followers are to form a reli- 
gious community like the chosen people of 
God in the past, the faithful descendants of 
faithful Abraham. 



156 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

The only other occasion on which Our Lord 
is reported to have used the word Church 
was a few months later. He is giving his 
disciples directions as to their treatment of 
a brother who has given offense, and in spite 
of considerate, brotherly treatment, remains 
obdurate. His words are: "And if he re- 
fuse to hear them, tell it unto the church; 
and if he refuse to hear the church, let him 
be unto thee as the Gentile and the publican. ' ' 
There Christ speaks of his Church, the com- 
munity of his followers, as already in ex- 
istence, and as possessing disciplinary pow- 
ers. 

It is not to be assumed that because Christ 
did not of tener use the word Church that the 
idea and design of his Church was not con- 
stantly present in his mind. 

Nothing is more clear than that Christ con- 
templated the founding of a religious society, 
through which his influence should be per- 
petuated, and the kingdom of God should be 
realized. To the instruction of the future 
leaders of this society he gave the utmost 
care. The terms of admission to this society 
he established in faith and repentance and 
baptism. For the spiritual unity of this so- 
ciety he prayed in his high-priestly prayer. 
To revive the loving remembrance of himself 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 157 

in this society lie instituted the sacrament of 
his supper. To assure its members of his 
triumph over death he appeared to them re- 
peatedly after his resurrection. To them he 
gave the commission to disciple all nations. 
And to enable them to discharge this commis- 
sion he promised them the gift of the Holy 
Spirit. 

In this sense Christ may be said to have 
established a society of his adherents. On 
two occasions, at least, he applied to this so- 
ciety the name Church, thus connecting it in 
thought with the chosen people of God in the 
past. His followers recognized that they 
constituted such a society, and applied to 
themselves the term Church. They used the 
word in the singular, when they thought of 
the whole body of Christ's followers in the 
world. And they used the word in the plural, 
when they thought of the various groups of 
Christ's followers in the widely scattered re- 
gions into which Christianity has spread. 

The separation of this' new Christian 
Church from the old Jewish Church was ac- 
complished gradually, and under the direc- 
tion of the Apostles. It was the detachment 
of the seed of a new religion from the husk in 
which it had developed. It came about in- 
evitably, as the proportion of Gentile con- 



158 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

verts in the Churches increased, and as the 
universal purpose of Christianity became 
more clearly apprehended. 

Thus the society which Christ formed 
within the Jewish Church became during the 
lifetime of his immediate followers a society 
outside the Jewish Church and in the great 
Eoman world. 

Now, the characteristics of this earliest 
Christian society are of the greatest interest 
to us. Not because they constitute an in- 
flexible model, after which the Church should 
always be organized. Far from that. But 
rather because they display certain spiritual 
qualities which we may well regard as essen- 
tial to the true life of the Church in any age. 

There are three suggestive figures under 
which Paul represents the Church in her re- 
lation to Christ. The first is the spiritual 
union, the relationship of love and depend- 
ence and protection, that exists between hus- 
band and wife. This conception also appears 
in the Book of the Bevelation, in which the 
Church is spoken of as " the bride, the wife of 
the Lamb." 

The Church is also represented under the 
figure of a "spiritual house" or temple, con- 
sisting of believers, who as "living stones" 
are built upon Christ the chief corner stone, 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 159 

and constitute a habitation for the spirit of 
God. This conception of the Church as a 
growing building is elaborated by St. Peter 
in a way that seems reminiscent of Christ's 
words to him concerning the building of his 
Church. 

The third figure, used frequently by Paul, 
is even more suggestive. It sets forth, not 
only the Church's relation to Christ, but the 
relation of Christians to each other, because 
of their relation to Christ. It represents the 
Church as a living body — a human body, if 
you please, — of which Christ is the head of 
the animating spirit. It is his life that vital- 
izes it. It is his spirit that directs its ac- 
tivities. The Church is his body, and those 
who constitute the Church are vitally bound 
together by mutual dependence and coopera- 
tion, as are the different members and func- 
tions of the human body. For their life and 
unity they depend upon Christ, their head. 
The Church, as so conceived, is a visible ex- 
pression of Christ's life in human society, a 
kind of permanent incarnation of his spirit. 

But this imagery of the Apostles in which 
the Church is conceived of as the bride of 
Christ, loved and protected by him ; as a liv- 
ing, growing temple of the Holy Spirit; as 
a body animated by the very life of Christ — ■ 



160 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

this imagery, however suggestive of the ideal 
relations of the Church to her Lord, is not 
so instructive as is the picture of the actual 
Church drawn for us in the Acts and in the 
Epistles. Here we see the Church begin, and 
live its life for a generation. 

There are three features of the Church, 
as it thus appears in the New Testament, 
that call for special attention. The first 
feature to be noticed is the democratic spirit 
manifest in these earliest Christian communi- 
ties. The Apostles, as might be expected 
from their close association with Christ, have 
prominence in the Churches as authoritative 
religious teachers. But the principle of self- 
government manifests itself from the very 
beginning. Even the eleven Apostles did not 
venture, by themselves, to complete their orig- 
inal number by appointing a successor to 
Judas. But they submitted the matter to 
the will of the whole Church. The " seven" 
in the Church at Jerusalem were not ap- 
pointed by the Apostles, but were elected by 
the whole congregation. The great issue as 
to the treatment of Gentile converts, which 
became acute in the Church at Antioch, was 
not determined by the Apostles, but by a 
council composed of all the Christians at Je- 
rusalem. These are representative examples 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 161 

of the democratic spirit and self-government 
of the earliest Churches. 

The Apostles treat their fellow-believers, 
not as subjects to be ruled, but as fellow-citi- 
zens in the Christian commonwealth. All 
the followers of Christ were regarded as be- 
longing to a royal priesthood ; and their right 
to teach or participate in public worship was 
determined solely by their spiritual endow- 
ments. So far from arrogating govern- 
mental authority to themselves, the Apostles 
describe themselves as the servants of the 
Churches. 

There is no governmental primacy of 
Peter or of any other Apostle discoverable 
in the New Testament. What Peter under- 
stood by Our Lord's reference to him as the 
rock on which he would build his Church may 
be best determined by Peter's own declara- 
tion that Christ is the chief corner stone of 
the Church, and also by his ready submission 
of matters relating to the policy of the 
Church to the judgment of his brethren. 

And the meaning of Our Lord's words con- 
cerning the binding and loosing power of the 
Church must be interpreted by the fact that 
the discipline of the earliest Churches was 
exercised, not by the Apostles, but by the 
Churches themselves. The Apostles show 



162 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

no disposition to lord it over God's heritage, 
but by humility and service they commend 
themselves as "ensamples to the flock." 

The second fact to be noticed is the variety 
manifest in all the eternal features of the 
Apostolic Church. 

The earliest believers, scattered by perse- 
cution or impelled by missionary zeal, soon 
established Christian communities in Sa- 
maria, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Eome, and 
on the north shore of Africa. 

These Churches were started in a variety 
of ways, and often without apostolic over- 
sight or knowledge. Their meetings were 
held in synagogues and hired halls, in private 
houses and in the open air. 

Their adherents were Jews of different 
sects and Gentiles of different races. They 
continued to observe their national customs. 
The Epistles of St. Paul and the letters to the 
seven Churches of Asia indicate how little 
uniformity there was in the Churches as to 
doctrine and worship, — and, indeed, as to the 
manifestation of the Christian virtues. 

And if we look at their form of organiza- 
tion, we shall discover that the Christian 
communities, in different parts of the Bo- 
man world, were free to organize themselves 
by adopting that form of association with 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 163 

which they were already most familiar. A 
close scrutiny of the rather meager refer- 
ences to the officership of the earliest 
Churches will reveal at least five different 
types of organization. Each Church ap- 
pears, also, as an independent, self-governed 
community. 

Here then is the utmost freedom and va- 
riety in the external features and organiza- 
tion of the earliest Churches. 

But amid all this variety in externals, we 
notice, as a third feature of the Apostolic 
Church, that it is marked by unity in spirit 
and purpose. The many Churches con- 
sciously compose one Church. Their com- 
mon relationship to Christ unifies them in 
spirit, in spite of all their external differ- 
ences. 

The ancient Jewish Ecclesia, the Israeli- 
tish people, had been conceived of as one, de- 
spite the fact that it was divided into tribes, 
and later dispersed through the nations. So 
the Christian Ecclesia, however widely scat- 
tered its members might be, or differently or- 
ganized, was readily conceived of as forming 
one spiritual brotherhood, one body of which 
Christ was the head. 

But its unity was not due to similarity in 
form of organization, or the recognition of 



164 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

any central human authority. It was "the 
unity of the Spirit." And it expressed it- 
self in ways that had a degree of spiritual 
significance that mere uniformity in organi- 
zation and customs would not have possessed. 

The conscious unity of the early Church 
rested upon facts like these: The followers 
of Christ everywhere had been taught sub- 
stantially the same gospel. They shared in 
the same sacraments. They entertained a 
common hope of the coming of the kingdom. 
They exhibited the common gifts and graces 
of the Spirit. They exercised abounding hos- 
pitality toward each other, and sent generous 
relief even to distant brethren whom famine 
or other disaster had brought to want. The 
Churches maintained intercommunication by 
letters or special messengers. And, more- 
over, there existed a group of men who trav- 
eled from one Christian community to an- 
other, preaching the gospel, and affording 
personal bonds between the scattered 
Churches. In Paul and Barnabas we have fa- 
miliar examples of these servants of the 
Church at large. It was by such means that 
the spirit of unity was maintained and ex- 
pressed in the earliest Christian communities. 

Such is the Church as it appears in the 
writings of Christ's immediate followers. It 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 165 

is a visible religious fellowship, composed of 
many and widely scattered, independent 
Christian communities. It is marked by de- 
mocracy in government, variety in external 
features, conscious unity of spirit and aim. 

It is a fellowship both divine and human. 
For the conditions of membership are two- 
fold : on the one hand, union of faith and love 
and obedience with God through Christ ; and 
on the other hand, a union of trust and love 
and service with fellow-believers in Christ. 

I have dwelt thus long upon the character- 
istics of the Church of the age of the Apostles 
for several reasons. In the first place, we 
may well believe that the immediate followers 
of Christ founded a society in which all the 
essential features of Christianity found ex- 
pression. It would appear vain to insist 
upon anything in doctrine or custom, as ab- 
solutely essential to Christianity, which had 
no existence in the Church as founded by 
those who knew Christ intimately. 

Again, we have noticed that the unity of 
the Apostolic Church was a unity of spirit, 
and was not due to the external features of 
its life. It was their common love and obedi- 
ence to Christ that made these early Chris- 
tians one. 

To realize this unity of the Church in spite 



166 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of differences of race and custom and doc- 
trine and individual leadership and occa- 
sional misunderstanding — that was an act of 
Christian faith. No one but a follower of 
Christ could realize that these many differ- 
ent Churches formed one Church. For that 
fact could only be discerned by one who had 
something of the Spirit of Christ. 

And in this respect, the situation is prac- 
tically the same to-day. The great diversi- 
ties in the external aspects of the Church, its 
many forms of organization, its wide differ- 
ences in doctrine and custom — these make the 
recognition of the unity of the Church an act 
of faith, — that is, of spiritual insight. To 
believe that there is to-day a "holy catholic 
Church" is possible only to those who have 
seen beneath that which is external and su- 
perficial in Christianity, and have penetrated 
to its heart — have realized that as many as 
are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of 
God, and that these constitute a divine-hu- 
man brotherhood, of which the Church is the 
visible expression and agency. 

No doubt it would have been much easier 
for the earliest Christians to realize the 
unity of the Church if the Apostles had or- 
ganized the Churches uniform in every par- 
ticular, and all had acknowledged allegiance 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 1G7 

to Peter. But in that case the unity of the 
(lunch would have seemed to rest upon its 
external features, not upon a common love 
for Christ and a mutual love and service. 
And such a fatal misunderstanding, the di- 
versities in the Apostolic Church fortunately 
made impossible. 

And those who to-day look for a Eeunion 
of Christendom in which the unity of the 
Church shall express itself in uniformity of 
organization, or custom, or dogma even will 
find little to sustain their expectations, either 
in the Church as it was founded by the 
Apostles or as it appears in any age since. 

For there has never been a time when the 
Church has existed as a perfectly homogene- 
ous society, similarly organized everywhere, 
uniform in doctrine and worship, and ac- 
knowledging one central human authority. 
Such an idea of the Church is a dream, and a 
dream with but small promise of realization. 

The Eeunion of Christendom is not to be 
achieved in that way, but by a completer pos- 
session and exercise of that faith and hope 
and love which are the essentials of Chris- 
tianity. 

It was not uniformity, but unity of spirit 
among his followers for which Christ prayed. 
And one of the great tasks of the Apostolic 



168 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

Age, and of every age since has been to main- 
tain, as Paul expresses it, "the unity of the 
Spirit in the bonds of peace." And this 
he declares is a unity that rests upon the rec- 
ognition of "One Lord, one faith, one bap- 
tism, one God and Father of all, who is over 
all, and through all, and in all." 

This conception of the Apostolic Church 
affords us the necessary starting point from 
which to follow the long course of the Church's 
development in organization and custom and 
doctrine. For it is possible to trace the de- 
velopment of this free spiritual brotherhood 
in which the Church began, through gradual 
changes and expansion, into a great ecclesi- 
astical institution, coextensive with the Ro- 
man world, and organized according to prin- 
ciples derived partly from the Old Testa- 
ment, partly from classic paganism, partly 
from the political constitution of the Empire 
itself. Instead of the democracy of the early 
Church we have sacerdotalism enthroned, the 
Church is ruled by Bishops and Archbishops 
and Patriarchs, claiming to have derived 
from the Apostles an authority that the 
Apostles themselves never claimed. 

But the visible unity of the Church thus 
attained was not so much the expression of 
' ' the unity of the Spirit, " as it was the result 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 169 

of uniformity in organization, and of external 
constraint. The Church was one, because the 
Eoman world was one. It was the State 
Church of the Empire. And when the Ro- 
man Empire broke into two parts, the East 
and the West, the Church also broke in two 
along the lines of natural cleavage, the old 
differences in spirit or temperament between 
the Greek and the Latin peoples. The 
Church hereafter appears in two great divi- 
sions, the Latin Church, whose administrative 
center is Rome, and the Greek Church, whose 
center is Constantinople. Each claims to be 
the only true successor of the Church of the 
Apostles. We cannot say that the Church 
lost her unity by this formal separation into 
two organizations. She had long before lost 
the only unity of any worth; for her early 
love and confidence and cooperation had 
given place to misunderstanding and jealousy 
and hatred. 

The Greek Church has in the main pre- 
served her organic unity until the present. 
But the Latin Church in the 16th century lost, 
by revolt, nearly all the nations of northern 
Europe. 

To many it no doubt seemed that the 
Protestant Reformation destroyed the unity 
of Western Christendom. But it really did 



170 WHAT SHALL, I BELIEVE 

no more than reveal the disunity that had al- 
ready developed between the Latin and Teu- 
tonic elements in the Church. They had lost 
their spiritual cohesion and were held to- 
gether only by external pressure. 

So the Church appears to-day in three 
great divisions, the Greek Church, the Ro- 
man Church, and the Protestant Church. 
But that these Churches in spite of their di- 
vision and defects constitute one Church of 
Jesus Christ, holy and catholic, is the affirma- 
tion of our deepest faith and highest hope 
and most Christian love. To believe it, as 
one discovers the fruits of the Spirit in the 
lives of adherents to every branch of the 
Church is the surest proof and the best re- 
ward of Christian charity, while to doubt 
it is to impugn God's providential direction 
of his Church, to narrow our religious sym- 
pathies, and to refuse recognition to those 
who are the friends of Christ. 

This does not require that we ignore or 
condone the grave defects that exist in our 
own and in the other branches of the Church. 
It is simply to estimate the Church, as we es- 
timate any other institution, not by its de- 
fects, but by its excellencies, by the tasks it 
has accomplished, by the services it has ren- 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 171 

dered, by the blessings it has conferred upon 
mankind. 

This is the creed of Protestantism regard- 
ing the Church, declared in all her great con- 
fessions. We believe that the marks of the 
true catholic Church are the proclamation of 
the gospel, the celebration of the sacraments, 
the fruits of the Spirit. 

It remains to speak of the Church in two 
practical relationships : 

And first as to the Church's authority in 
matters of religion. Can we trust the Church 
to tell us what to believe regarding God and 
what to do in our various human relation- 
ships? In other words, how far do the doc- 
trine and discipline of the Church afford us 
a guide to belief and conduct ? Not an infal- 
lible guide, certainly. That is not to be ex- 
pected. In religion, as in all the great ven- 
tures of life, God requires us to exercise our 
own best judgment. He expects us to find 
the wisdom of God for our guidance, when, 
in humble dependence upon him, we use our 
own highest wisdom. 

But although not infallible, the guidance 
of the Church is nevertheless adequate to 
the practical needs of life. 

And the fact that we do not give unques- 



172 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

tioning acceptance and obedience to the deliv- 
erances of the Church, does not release us, 
in any sense, from religious obligation. It 
simply means that the moral imperative un- 
der which we act, is not to be regarded as 
something external to ourselves, though it be 
a great historic religious institution. We 
are required to put the Church's creeds and 
mandates to the test of our own moral judg- 
ment and act upon our own approval of them. 

By this means the authority of the Church 
evokes the authority of our conscience. 
The voice of the Church finds an echo in the 
voice of God in our hearts. And this saves 
us from a mere intellectual acquiescence in 
the Church's creed, which is something less 
than faith, and a mere mechanical obedience 
to the Church's commands, which is some- 
thing less than virtue. 

The authority that the Church possesses 
she has derived primarily from Christ, her 
head. It is not so much the authority to rule, 
as it is the authority to teach. Christ is in- 
deed a king, but he desires no other alle- 
giance, than that which he wins by love. And 
the ultimate basis of his authority as a 
teacher is the sure answer of the human heart 
to his teachings. We recognize, as did 
Peter, that his words are "the words of 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 173 

eternal life." Consequently, the authority 
of the Church rests upon the fact that she 
has preserved the image and the words, and, 
as has no other institution, the Spirit of 
Christ. To her has also been committed the 
priceless heritage of the Christian sacra- 
ments. 

That the Church's interpretations of the 
words and Spirit of Christ have been kept 
free from all admixture of human error, no 
one would claim. But that in her creeds and 
discipline she has preserved the essentials of 
Christian faith and morals, no one will deny. 
For the surest test of the possession of the 
truth is the bearing of the fruits of the Spirit. 
And for nearly nineteen centuries the Church 
has been engaged in a vast enterprise, the 
emancipation of men from the thraldom of 
sin, and the cultivation of the graces of the 
Christian life. And during all these centu- 
ries, as a result of the teaching and nurture 
of the Church, men have won their way into 
the glorious liberty of the sons of God, and 
have manifested the graces of the Spirit. Not 
always in equal degree, but always in a de- 
gree sufficient to indicate their reality. 

Now this experiment has been tried so 
long, in so many lands, and among so many 
races, that it amounts to a demonstration that 



174 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

the Church speaks with the authority of the 
truth. 

Vincentius, a Gallic monk of the fifth cen- 
tury, said that one might be sure of the truth 
of those doctrines "that had been believed 
always, everywhere, and by everybody. " 
That rule would reduce our faith to a very 
meager content. Much more safely may we 
accept those teachings of the Church which 
always, everywhere, and in everybody have 
produced the graces of faith and hope and 
love. For the kind of character that the 
Church forms by her teaching and nurture is 
a surer witness of the Spirit, a more convinc- 
ing proof of her authority, than any theory 
of papal infallibility, or unbroken line of 
bishops, or inerrancy of ancient documents. 
And as so tested the Church is felt by every 
honest heart to speak with divine authority. 
"We can safely trust her to teach what we 
should "believe concerning God and what 
duty God requires of man." 

Let us notice, in conclusion, the relation of 
the Church to the kingdom of God and to the 
service of Christ. Though Christ spoke of 
his Church on but two occasions, he spoke of 
the kingdom of God constantly. To more 
perfectly establish this kingdom among men 
was his life purpose. His teachings are 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 175 

chiefly concerned with the principles of this 
divine kingdom. He taught his disciples to 
pray for the coming of this kingdom. He 
sent them out to continue his work in estab- 
lishing this kingdom in the world. 

Christ nowhere gave a definition of the 
kingdom. But he made it very plain that it 
was unlike other kingdoms, in that its chief 
domain was the human heart. A man was 
admitted to citizenship therein, when he 
yielded allegiance to him. 

But although the kingdom of God is found 
primarily in the hearts of those who love and 
obey God, yet it is a kingdom that assumes 
visibility as a common allegiance to Christ 
brings his followers into association and co- 
operation. It is by this means that the prin- 
ciples of the kingdom are realized in human 
society and express themselves in a social 
order in which the spirit of Christ reigns. 

For although Our Lord did not define the 
kingdom, Paul did; and he defined it as 
"righteousness and peace and' joy in the Holy 
Spirit." These are all social graces, possi- 
ble only as the divine order is realized in our 
human relationships. 

"Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done," 
is the significant order of the petitions in the 
Lord's Prayer. The kingdom of God comes 



176 WHAT SHAUL» I BELIEVE 

as men do the will of God. And the will of 
God is that men should live, here and here- 
after, in righteousness and peace and joy. 

Consequently the kingdom of God repre- 
sents ideal human society, mankind upon the 
highest possible plane of moral and material 
achievement. It is not a Utopia, an ideally 
happy region, nor a Golden Age. It is rather 
a state of human society, in which all that is 
best in man, his highest hopes, his noblest 
impulses, his divinest aspirations come to 
realization. Hence the kingdom of God, 
though it is always coming, can never fully 
come on earth. It is also the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Now, although Christ does not state it in 
so many words, yet he makes it very plain 
that his Church was to be the agency through 
which his kingdom was to be brought in. 
This is also the thought of the Apostles. 
They gave their lives to the building up of the 
Church in order thereby to bring in the king- 
dom of God. 

And that has been the attitude of intelli- 
gent Christians ever since. They have 
thought of the kingdom as finding expression 
in the Church ; but as being something much 
larger than the Church. They have thought 
of the Church as existing, not for herself, but 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 177 

for the extension among men of the kingdom 
of righteousness and peace and joy. They 
have seen in her the appointed agency of 
Christ for the redemption of society. 

There is in some quarters a disposition to 
magnify the importance of the kingdom to 
the disparagement of the Church. It is dif- 
ficult to conceive of Christ taking such an at- 
titude. For it is the Church against which 
he declares ' i the gates of Hades shall not pre- 
vail." It is the Church, the Apostles affirm, 
that "he purchased with his own blood." 
It is the Church that is "the pillar and 
ground of the truth." It is the Church 
through which there might be made known to 
all men "the manifold wisdom of God." 

The Church is God's agency for the estab- 
lishment of his kingdom among men, and 
without his Church there would be no king- 
dom — at least as we know it. Such is the 
New Testament teaching. 

And the long history of the Church makes 
this fact very plain and impressive. The life 
of Christianity has been transmitted from 
generation to generation through the Church. 
She has been the channel through which the 
stream of divine grace has flowed down the 
centuries. It is impossible to trace a con- 
secutive development of the kingdom except 



178 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

through her, and it is her life alone that 
gives continuity to the progress of the Chris- 
tian civilization. 

For it was the Church, as an organization, 
that gathered up all that was best in the 
classic age, and infusing into it a new spirit, 
saved it from the destruction that over- 
whelmed the Roman Empire. 

It was the Church also that transmitted the 
priceless heritage of the classic culture 
through all the ignorance and social chaos of 
the Middle Ages, and thus provided the basis 
of our modern civilization. 

And what the Church has done for the de- 
velopment and transmission of that sum of 
institutions and influences that we call our 
Christian civilization, she has done for every 
individual element of it. There is not a single 
wholesome factor in our boasted civilization 
which has not directly or indirectly received 
its inspiration from the Church. 

There are many beneficent agencies in our 
day which are children of the Church, but 
have quite lost the knowledge of their parent- 
age. To conceive of them as rivals of the 
Church, or as substitutes for the Church, is 
to ignore their origin, and the sources from 
which they still draw their life. None of 
these children of the Church, however unfilial 



CONCERNING THE CHURCH 179 

their spirit, could long survive their mother. 
And the best way to render these philan- 
thropic agencies strong and efficient is to 
strengthen the Church from which they de- 
rive their vitality. 

If you desire to serve Christ in the service 
of your fellow-men, then the surest way to 
make your life count for the betterment of 
mankind is by personal alliance with the 
Church — which is Christ's agency for the 
bringing in of his kingdom. The mere fact 
of your alliance with the Church at once gives 
positiveness to your influence. It aligns you 
with the forces that make for righteousness. 
It associates you with the friends — not the 
foes — of Christ. And, what is scarcely less 
important, alliance with the Church will con- 
serve and transmit your influence to poster- 
ity. The moral energies of your life will 
become a part of her deathless life, and will 
grow with her growth. Thus the streams of 
your personal influence, instead of being 
evaporated or lost in the arid wastes of earth, 
will unite to swell the great life-giving cur- 
rent of the Church, and be borne along in her 
ever enlarging service to mankind. 

And what inspiration can come to us — save 
the blessed influence of Christ our Saviour — 
more fitted to sustain us in high endeavor and 



180 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

unselfish service than the reassuring con- 
sciousness that we are a part of the greatest, 
divinest institution that the world has ever 
known? An institution that has seen empires 
rise and fall, and that with each century has 
added countless multitudes to her adherents, 
an institution that is to-day pressing her 
peaceful conquests in every land and people 
upon the face of the earth, that already dom- 
inates the thought and policy of the dominant 
nations of the world, that with each passing 
year extends her sway over the hearts of men, 
and tightens her grip upon the conscience of 
the world ! 

What other human brotherhood is to be 
compared with her? 

And to what nobler purpose can we devote 
our lives than by swearing allegiance to her 
divine Master, and by participating in her 
blessed ministries of love and service? 



CONCEENING THE EESUEEECTION 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 

BY JAMES STEVENSON EIGGS 

Over the event which this glad Easter day 
commemorates there can be no possible ex- 
aggeration of true rejoicing. Because of it 
Christian song has in it an abiding note of 
triumph and Christian life an inextinguish- 
able hope. 

" ? Tis the spring of souls to-day; 

Christ hath burst His prison, 
And from three days' sleep in death 

As a sun hath risen; 
All the winter of our sins, 

Long and dark, is flying 
From His light, to whom we give 

Laud and praise undying." 

In the brief time at my disposal let me try 
to tell you what the intelligent faith of the 
Church is regarding this momentous reality. 
It would be surprising if a fact and teaching 
so central and essential had never been ques- 
tioned. Indeed the vital character of both 
has been shown in the serious determined 
questioning they have constantly been called 
183 



184 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

to face. The "time-spirit" of every age has 
busied itself with them. Our own time has 
asked its questions prompted thereto by con- 
ceptions born of the scientific and historical 
spirit, and one of the results which this spirit 
has sought to establish I find most convenient 
to use in order to bring the whole subject be- 
fore you. That attempted result is a dis- 
tinction between "The Easter Message" and 
"The Easter Faith." The Easter message 
is the story of the empty grave and of the va- 
rious appearances of the risen Lord to the 
disciples. That, says the "time-spirit" of our 
day, is of little worth and can be given up. 
"The Easter Faith" which is the conviction 
that Jesus still lives with God is the vital 
matter and must be kept. It is as you see an 
attempt to keep the religious value of the doc- 
trine of the resurrection, while denying the 
historical fact upon which the religious value 
is supposed to rest. No actual resurrection 
of Jesus took place and yet Jesus lives. That 
is its judgment. What is supposed to be the 
exalted and spiritual character of this settle- 
ment of the matter has been its fascination. 
It is a long way from the crude denials of two 
generations ago. While it dismisses the mi- 
raculous it seems to offer much to faith. It 
is no sweeping denial. All the terms which 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 185 

set forth the recognition of a present, living, 
exalted Christ it adopts and sanctions. In 
one point it agrees with all the skepticism of 
the past. There was no grave in a Judaean 
garden made empty by a physical resurrec- 
tion. The message of the angel at the sepul- 
cher was never spoken. That this is not the 
faith of the Christian Church you well know. 
I wish however, to say a few things about the 
fact itself. From the time Paul wrote about 
it (and his letter to the Corinthians is earlier 
than the Gospels in their present form) the 
actual rising of Jesus from the dead has 
been to the Church one of the cardinal facts 
of His experience. Our acceptance of the 
fact is of course based upon the evidence of 
the Scripture and there are some considera- 
tions connected with this evidence to which I 
wish to call your especial attention. First, 
that while there are notable variations in the 
reminiscences of the appearance of Jesus, all 
the variations bear witness to two facts ; the 
empty grave and the risen Lord. We know 
now enough of the manner in which the gospel 
originated to give a rational explanation of 
the variations, so much so as to allow them 
to constitute no substantial argument against 
truthfulness. Indeed harmonization of all de- 
tails into a perfectly jointed account is no 



186 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

longer an aim in the study of the Gospels. 
They are not histories in our sense of the 
term, but memorabilia, personal reminis- 
cences, incomplete from the beginning and 
given from varying points of view. Again 
it is well to note how varied are the wit- 
nesses to the death and burial of Jesus. The 
Roman soldiers whose custom it was to break 
the legs of the victims of crucifixion came to 
the cross of Jesus and refrained from their 
cruel purpose because they saw that He was 
dead already. To be sure of death, how- 
ever, a soldier pierced His side with a spear. 
(John xix, 33-34.) Joseph of Arimathaea de- 
siring to give Jesus honorable burial went to 
Pilate and asked for the body. Pilate won- 
dering that He was so soon dead (victims of 
crucifixion lingered hours in awful anguish) 
sent for the Roman centurion and asked him 
for the facts. The centurion reported that 
He had been dead for some little time and so 
Pilate gave Joseph permission to take the 
body. (Mark xv, 43-45.) To that sepulcher 
hewn in stone, where up to that time man had 
never yet lain, Joseph, Nicodemus and the 
group of Galilaean women took the body of 
their Master. (Matt, xxvii, 59-61; Mark 
xv, 46-47; Luke xxiii, 53-55; John xix, 
39-42.) Against the door of the sepul- 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 187 

cber a stone was rolled. To guard against 
any possible deception on the part of 
the disciples the Pharisees and chief 
priests went to Pilate and asked him to 
make the sepulcher sure in order that the 
disciples should not steal the body for the 
sake of backing up a statement that Jesus 
had made that He would rise from the dead. 
Pilate handed the matter over to them and 
they sealed the entrance and placed a guard. 
When the guard reported what had happened 
on the first Easter morning, the chief priests 
and the rulers bribed the soldiers to say that 
the disciples came by night and stole the body 
away while they slept. Mark the group that 
was in some way interested in that dead body 
— a Roman governor, Roman soldiers, Phari- 
sees, chief priests, Joseph, Nicodemus and the 
Galilaean women. And what about the dis- 
ciples ? Were they in some secret place plot- 
ting to bolster up a prophecy about resurrec- 
tion, as the Pharisees declared- to Pilate they 
might? Convenient as these saddened and 
perplexed disciples have been in all theories 
which have tried to account for the resurrec- 
tion faith without allowing an Easter mes- 
sage, they play the part assigned to them with 
very poor success. If ever men stood baffled 
before an utterly strange experience, they did 



188 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

before the issues of Friday of Passion week. 
Jesus had tried to prepare them for it. From 
the days of Caesarea Philippi He had been 
speaking to them plainly of His death and 
resurrection. At first they would hear noth- 
ing of it and they were exceedingly slow to 
take it in. We are not to be too ready to 
blame them. Current conceptions of the Mes- 
siah's glory were all in another direction and 
they were largely concerned with personal 
ambitions. But in view of the theories which 
had set them to work to create an Easter mes- 
sage, they were providentially dull. There 
never was a greater lot of moonshine than 
the rhetoric which draws visions of a risen 
Lord out of their deathless enthusiasms or in 
any way makes them psychologically ready 
to spring upon the world such a piece of im- 
agination as should pass for fact through all 
these centuries of the Church's history. 
Their deathless enthusiasm did not save them 
from hurriedly leaving Jesus amid the uproar 
in Gethsemane and with the exception of 
Peter and John, their names are significantly 
absent from the record of the crucifixion 
scenes. If the Scripture is to be relied on at 
all, visionary hypotheses are pitifully lame 
in their psychology of resurrection construc- 
tions. The very frankness of the apostles 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 189 

about themselves is good evidence that they 
are telling the truth and they give not the 
smallest space for such psychology to stand 
upon, and even if it could stand, what is to be 
said of the empty grave? The most recent 
life of Christ, which has come to us from 
Germany, says that Joseph of Arimathsea, 
sorry upon reflection that he had put Jesus, 
a crucified man, into his fine new sepulcher, 
went and took the body away. "Such," the 
writer adds, - i seems to be the simplest expla- 
nation of this secret transaction." That 
"simplest explanation" requires us to believe 
that the friends of Jesus knew where the body 
was ; at least, that they knew that He had not 
risen from the dead, while all the time "vi- 
sions ' ' were making them believe that He had 
and it requires us to believe that with the 
knowledge that His lifeless body was hidden 
in the small rock-tomb near Jerusalem, they 
were zealous to proclaim everywhere His res- 
urrection from the dead, suffering all manner 
of contempt for their message and at the 
same time urging men to the most exalted 
standard of living. Another has earnestly 
tried to relieve the situation from such an 
incongruity by saying that the change in the 
whole attitude of the apostles was brought 
about by God-inspired visions, but it is cer- 



190 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

tainly more satisfactory to believe that the 
faith of the disciples and the Church rests 
upon the fact of the resurrection than that it 
rests upon God-inspired visions given to cre- 
ate belief in a fact which after all was not a 
fact. No. The Easter message belongs with 
the Easter faith. Peter preached that mes- 
sage and on the day of Pentecost argued for 
the " empty grave" in his reference to a res- 
urrection which avoided death's corruption; 
Paul preached it and made the same argu- 
ment in the synagogue in Antioch and the 
Church has ever since made it the sure basis 
of the Easter faith. Were there no fact of 
this kind behind the faith and preaching of 
the apostles then the Christian consciousness 
which is the outcome of their convictions is 
based upon a deception ; is begotten of false- 
hood. Let him think it who can. 

And now what is the meaning of this fact? 
What is the content of our Easter faith? 
Why is the resurrection such a vital factor 
in the work of Redemption. I answer 

7. Because it gave validity to the life and 
death of Jesus. In the first place it verified 
His own predictions. It is true that these had 
not so gotten hold of the minds of those to 
whom they were given as to make them look 
for and anticipate a resurrection, but they 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 191 

had been uttered and were remembered. In 

the dark despair that would have settled 
down upon the disciples the falsity of His 
words would have sooner or later been em- 
phasized, had these predictions never had ful- 
fillment. But far more than the falsity of His 
words would have been the enigma of His 
whole mission. Difficult as it was for the dis- 
ciples to adjust themselves to the truth which 
He uttered and the life which He lived and 
required of His followers, they nevertheless 
expressed something of the divineness there 
was in it. They had heard Him say that who- 
soever believed in Him should never die: 
that He had come to save the world ; that He 
was to found a Church against which the 
gates of darkness should not prevail and yet 
He had Himself gone to the silence of the 
grave. How could such claims be consistent 
with His utter powerlessness over death? Ee- 
cently a novelist took up the suggestion of 
Holtzmann that Joseph of Arimathsea had re- 
moved the body of Jesus from his grave and 
that beyond the imagination of the disciples 
that was all there was for belief in a resurrec- 
tion. What resulted? The cross became the 
scaffold on which a good man was put to 
death. All that Jesus said about God's care 
and truth's imperishableness came to naught. 



192 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

Calvary was a tragedy in more senses than 
the death of a good man. It was the death of 
the most vital hopes; the focal point of the 
world's despair. If there was one thing 
which Jesus loved to talk about it was "life" 
— that mysterious indefinable reality for 
which we are all, in some form, eager. He 
came to give it abundantly in its highest and 
truest realizations, and yet, if there was no 
empty grave — a few embittered ecclesiastics 
were able to make His words seem a mockery. 
To be sure He taught us exalted truth and 
lived it in radiant perfection, but after all 
He simply set up an excellent ideal and gave 
us no power to reach it. We must take up 
the dreary, wearying business of working our 
way to whatever heaven there is, with no cer- 
tainty of attaining it. It is all well enough 
to say that "the religious consciousness to 
which Christianity has given birth is that 
which is of value to the twentieth century 
Christian" but it is of equal moment to re- 
member "that in order that that conscious- 
ness might be born the first century disciple 
had to be convinced that the Jesus whom he 
had known and loved, whom he had seen 
crucified and buried, was not in the tomb but 
exalted to the right hand of God." What 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 193 

is a life that lias no holding form against the 
black, chilling shadow of death ! 

Even pagan speculation with the help of 
cold reason has been able to bridge the chasm 
of death. Have we nothing but the over- 
wrought visions of a few Galilaean peasants 
to help us hope ? Nay. 

" Strong son of God, immortal love 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace 
Believing where we cannot prove. 

" Thine are these orbs of light and shade 
Thou madest life in man and brute, 
Thou madest Death ; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull which thou hast made." 

Had I time I should like to show how from 
that reality "life" which in the form of its 
resurrection glory touched his spirit on the 
Damascus road, Paul worked out his whole 
theology of the cross, finding in the presence 
of the Christ-life in his heart the meaning of 
the Messiah's mission from the very giving 
up of His equality with the Father to the final 
triumph when those who are Christ's shall 
come with Him in the completeness of resur- 
rection. I should like to show you how John 
with that same ever-recurring realization in 
his mind, builds up his Gospel by the addition 



194 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

of claim upon claim from the lips of Jesus 
until in the eleventh chapter, he tops them all 
with that word by the touch of Lazarus, "I 
am the resurrection, and the life, ' ' i. e, " I am 
the resurrection by being the life." In con- 
firmation of that not only does Lazarus come 
out from the realm of death but immediately 
the story proceeds to show us how Jesus Him- 
self walked through the grave to the limitless 
life beyond. It is true that the cross — symbol 
as it is of the righteousness and love of God 
— is the central object of this book of divine 
revelation, but I fear we do not always have 
as clearly in mind the fact that without the 
resurrection that cross would have been little 
more than a spectacular display — an object 
perhaps of adoration for those who could at 
all understand its expression of devotion to 
righteousness and its heroic self-sacrifice — 
but nothing more. If you think that state- 
ment exaggerates, listen to the words of 
Paul: "If Christ hath not been raised, your 
faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then 
they also that are fallen asleep in Christ have 
perished." Death has mastery all along the 
line. Thus on the side of the spirit, the resur- 
rection is indispensable. Without it we 
might have been members of a Galilaean 
school — Jesus Himself being the master ; we 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 195 

never could have been what the Scripture 
calls "the body of Christ" unified and vital- 
ized by the life of Him who is our head. 

True as all this is and essential as it is, 
it is safe to say that the emphasis in our 
thoughts upon this Easter day is rather upon 
that phase of life's triumph long, long ago 
which has in it the promise for us of victory 
over the grave — in the resurrection of the 
body. Let me therefore speak for a few mo- 
ments of the contents of our Easter faith 
from this point of view. As the resurrection 
of Jesus gave validity to His life and death in 
their bearing upon our spiritual resurrection, 
so 

II. It gave the promise and pledge of the 
redemption of our complete personality. 
Personality as the Bible knows it is made up 
of soul and body. Man is not simply a spirit. 
He is an embodied spirit. There is no such 
doctrine in the Scriptures as "the immortal- 
ity of the soul." That conception so fully 
inwrought into the speech of Christians is a 
Greek doctrine. The Bible teaches the im- 
mortality of man. It is significant how 
heathen cults have tried in various ways to 
keep the body for the departed soul. The 
heart instinctly draws back from a disembod- 
ied life. Its vagueness and shadow-likeness 



196 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

not only baffle the imagination but chill the 
soul. There is not much comfort in the 
thought of an intermediate state — brighten 
it up as we may with our declarations about 
the presence of the Lord. As compared with 
the deliverances of theology, the New Testa- 
ment says surprisingly little about it. If we 
could only come to see that the day of res- 
urrection is not yet a long way ahead of us 
there would be little need for this halfway 
house to heaven and completed redemption. 
The significant fact is that in bringing life 
and immortality to light Jesus gave us the 
revelation of an entire redemption. How is 
this to be interpreted for us? The empty 
grave implies a literal physical resurrection. 
Is that what we mean when we say i ' I believe 
in the resurrection of the body?" The an- 
swer to that question must be made with care 
and to help to such carefulness let me call 
your attention to the twofold series of facts 
discoverable in the resurrection experiences 
of our Lord. In considering the fact of the 
resurrection I called your attention to the 
necessity for the first disciples of indisput- 
able proof that their Lord whom they had 
seen cruelly put to death was alive again. 
To meet this necessity we see Him offering 
the print of the nails in His hands as a test 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 197 

of identity; we hear Him saying to His dis- 
ciples "handle me, and see; for a spirit hath 
not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having 
(Luke xxiv, 36-43) . He eats of the broiled fish 
they had prepared for their evening meal. 
They are not to be mistaken ; this is He who 
suffered on the cross. He was no ghost flit- 
ting about the hills of Judaea or along the 
Galilaean lake — but the incarnate Lord who 
had come from the grave. Eye, ear and hand 
were giving certitude of His presence. The 
purpose of that explicit, definite, unmistak- 
able exhibition of Himself was to restore to 
them belief in His Messiahship and to lay 
deep and sure in their minds the faith which 
should be preached to the world. 

Along with these facts, having this purpose, 
is another series which shows powers of an- 
other order. There is a mysterious side to 
that post-resurrection life. The limits of 
time and space do not seem to press upon 
Him who appears and disappears; who is 
here and there, as He wills. He sits at the 
table and as the wondering disciples discover 
Him He is gone. He enters through the 
closed doors, and stands in the midst of the 
startled group in the room in Jerusalem. 
The body can, when He wishes, seemingly per- 
fectly assume the spiritual. Only when He 



198 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

wills does He bring Himself to those rela- 
tions which shall make His identity with their 
Lord of the days of the Galilaean ministry 
clear to His disciples. What is the relation 
of these two states has been long the subject 
of earnest speculation. Could He change 
from a physical to a wholly spiritual state? 
Was the physical body so dominated by the 
spirit that He could make it follow its be- 
hests in ways utterly unknown to us ? An an- 
swer to any of these questions is but an opin- 
ion. Only this can we say — that new powers, 
new possibilities, a new glory are here evi- 
dent. How much may we conclude from it? 
Let Paul answer. With a discrimination that 
reveals divine guidance does he seek to in- 
terpret for us the significance of the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus. With an insistence which 
comes from his understanding of its value he 
lays emphasis upon the actual physical res- 
urrection of his Lord. There he stops. It is 
not the physical which shall inherit the king- 
dom of heaven — flesh and blood cannot in- 
herit the kingdom of heaven. But how are the 
dead raised ? And with what manner of body 
do they come? The answer begins with that 
argument from analogy whose first statement 
is "thou sowest not the body which shall be." 
There can be no such purpose in our resur- 



CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION 199 

rection as demanded the physical resurrec- 
tion of our Lord. This body fitted for life 
here would be but a cumbersome machine for 
the life there. Its frailty, weakness and lim- 
itations ; its needs, afflictions and diminishing 
power ; its constituents, structure and stabil- 
ity — all these make it, wonderful as it is, but 
a feeble instrument for the spirit. How 
swiftly thought can outrun it! How easily 
beyond its boundaries can sweep the imagina- 
tion ! How it trembles and often fails under 
the pressure of intense emotion ! It is along 
the line of that second series of facts that 
Paul gets his hints for something far, far 
better. And that we may just for a moment 
see what easy possibility there is for a body 
adopted to the boundless freedom of the 
spirit, he calls us to look all about us and 
into the heavens above where "one star dif- 
fereth from another star in glory" and see 
what a rich variety of bodies God has made. 
And then his thought runs over that change 
which is needed before we shall be properly 
embodied for the life of eternity. Power, 
glory, honor, incorruption — these are the 
marks of that spiritual body or that body 
fitted to the spirit which shall make life 
beatific and service an abounding joy. All 
this he brings out of the spiritual quicken- 



200 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

ing power of the risen Lord. The last Adam 
(the risen Christ) is a life-giving spirit. 
When once we have come into vital relations 
with Him the resurrection work begins which 
shall not end until a spiritual body shall 
clothe the redeemed spirit and the whole man 
shall be immortal. Death is swallowed up in 
victory. With what reason do we make this 
day glad with rejoicing! There is light 
enough in the fact it commemorates and the 
promise it holds forth to illuminate every 
place darkened by sorrow. It can make us 
ready to look death fearlessly in the face and 
the glory of an endless life will but make its 
blessing even greater. 



CONCEBNING THE FUTUKE LIFE 



CONCEENING THE FUTUEE LIFE 

BY ARTHUR STEPHEN HOYT 

II Tim. i, 10 : " Who hath abolished death, and hath 
brought life and immortality to light through the gos- 
pel." 

The Apostle does not say that Christ gave 
ns immortal life, but that He revealed such 
a life. 

In fact belief in the future life has been 
almost as universal as belief in God. It 
might be called one of the instinctive, essen- 
tial, universal faiths of the world. 

From what we know of the earliest records 
and of primitive races, it is right to infer 
that the notion of an unseen world beyond 
daily life is coeval with the beginning of man. 
It is the way the first man met the problem 
of death. But the notions of the future life 
before Christianity, or beyond the reach of 
Christianity are very crude and vague. The 
primeval ghost world is at best a shadowy, 
gloomy region. 

" Brother, thou dwellest in the darksome land, 
And talkest with the feeble tribes of ghosts," 
203 



204 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

are the words Matthew Arnold puts into the 
mouth of Thor over the corpse of Balder. 
Even peoples of a high civilization like Egypt 
and Greece had gross, material ideas of the 
future. It has been hard for men to picture 
life separate from the body that we know, 
and the welfare of the spirit was connected 
with the proper rites of burial. 

What is true of the childhood of the race is 
true of the childhood of every man. It is 
almost impossible for a little child to have a 
notion of death. Students of child life to- 
day tell us that "the child seems unable to 
think of life as ending at all. ' ' 

Wordsworth was wiser than he knew when 
he made his little maid reply : 

u Master, we are seven." 

" But they are dead : those two are dead ! 
Their spirits are in heaven ! " 
'Twas throwing words away: for still 
The little maid would have her will 
And said, "Nay, we are seven." 

And this faith of the child in life has a won- 
derful way of persisting through the shatter- 
ing of many ideals and the passing away of 
many fond beliefs. It seems to be a constant 
factor in the growth of life. An Ingersoll 
still speaks of life as between two eternities 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 205 

and cherishes a deathless hope for those he 
loves. 

The hope is not only true of the childhood 
of the race, but is coextensive with the history 
of human development. Many of the ideas 
are shadowy and even grotesque. The quies- 
cence of Buddhism, the dismal world of 
Greek thought, the hideous features of Teu- 
tonic mythology are very unlike the beautiful 
hope of Christianity, but all witness to the 
general and abiding instinct of the human 
heart. 

The great thinkers of the race have con- 
fessed their faith in immortality. "Be as- 
sured," said the dying Socrates, "that I trust 
to join the society not only of good men, but 
that I shall go to abide with God." Cicero, 
"the most humane, the most accomplished 
and enlightened, of all the Bomans," argues 
before the Boman senate that death is only a 
change of abode. And Emmanuel Kant, the 
greatest of the moderns, speaks of the "moral 
law within as revealing to me a life inde- 
pendent of the animal kingdom, . . . 
which is not restricted by the conditions and 
limits of this life, but stretches out to eter- 
nity." 

I need hardly say to you that the great 
poets have cherished the immortal hope. 



206 WHAT SHALL, I BELIEVE 

Homer 9 s future is a sad world, unlighted by 
moral ideas, yet the prophecy of better things. 
Through the pages of Dante "the eternal 
realities of another world were continually 
betraying their selves." Shakespere's con- 
tribution to the higher faith of the race is 
his revelation of the moral conflict of life, and 
the final triumph of goodness. Wordsworth 
speaks of 

The faith that looks thro' death. 

Tennyson hoped to meet his Pilot face to 
face. And Browning was one who 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

But I should give a wrong impression if 
I made the faith of such gifted souls the 
common hope of men. They were the seers, 
the men who had attained to heights of life 
and truth. They were touched with the light 
when the valleys were still in the shadows. 
But the shadows were not wholly dark, and 
men everywhere have had some dim thought 
of a world they could not see. The thought 
of the future world is an element in all great 
religions, a force in all great civilizations. 

Whence comes this wide-spread belief, this 
all but universal hope? Nature gives sugges- 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 207 

tions of it. The first thoughts came to man 
through the world he could see and touch, and 
we still draw lessons of hope from the life 
about us. Open the latest magazine on your 
table and you will find some hints of nature 
to feed the hope of life. More than 150 
years ago Bishop Butler made a noble use 
of the analogy of nature. Life, he reasoned, 
is seen to persist through different and chang- 
ing forms. The eagle in the shell and the 
eagle in the air, — how different the form and 
yet how the life persists ! And it is no more 
difficult to think of man in these earthly bod- 
ies and man in a higher spiritual form. The 
presumption is in favor of continuous life 
unless there be some fatal interruption. 

The force of Butler's argument is greatly 
increased by modern science. It teaches that 
all life has developed from a simple form — 
and the persistence of life. In evolution it is 
as natural for man to grow into the immortal 
life as to have attained erect posture and 
articulate speech. Nature says that the life 
of man will go on unless death stops it. 

Can death put an end to the development 
of man's life? No man can prove that con- 
sciousness is the product of molecular mo- 
tion, that thought and brain are one. Science 
can not prove immortality, but it has nothing 



208 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

to say against it. Man's growth thus far 
inevitably suggests something better. 

But the strongest suggestions of immor- 
tality are not from without but from within, 
not from nature but from the spiritual expe- 
rience of man. Given the thought of God and 
the sense, however dim, that we are related to 
God, and we can not help believing in a fu- 
ture life. The thought will go beyond the 
barrier of time and place. Faith in immor- 
tality is faith in God. Lame hands of faith 
they are on the world's altar stairs, but still 
reaching up and calling to what seems to be 
Lord of all. 

God is just, men say. His world must be 
one of order. Even from the half -built world 
of human life that we know, from its dust 
and scaffolding, we catch some glimpse of 
what the righteous God is doing. The self- 
ish and the vainglorious shall not always 
have the first place. Men shall not always 
fatten on oppression nor the children cry for 
bread. God sits behind the shadow keeping 
watch above his own. The very inequalities 
of life now, the fact that every true man 
must admit, that human society is too earthly 
and blind to recognize and reward the best 
life, all point to a future where the moral 
order shall be supreme. When the disci- 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 209 

pline shall be gained, a life shall open where 
there is perfect harmony. 

God is true to His promise. His word can 
not fail. The hope that the best men have 
cherished from the very first: whence comes 
it? What can it be but the voice of God in 
the Soul? It must be more than the projec- 
tion of the human mind, the vision of life to 
satisfy the craving of the heart. Must it not 
be the word of a faithful Creator, who can 
not deceive the creature of His hand ! 

And God is good, His work must go on to 
its perfection. We live in an unfinished 
world, and we have an unfinished world 
within. "Worlds yet remain unwritten," 
said Carlyle. What possibilities of life in 
each of us ! We feel that the life of thought, 
of love, of duty is just begun. "I should 
like to live a thousand years," said Albert 
Barnes, looking off on the valleys of the 
Oriskany and Mohawk and thinking of the 
peoples that had marched westward and the 
results achieved in the fifty years since he 
graduated from college. "Greater things 
far are to be done in the future, and I should 
like to have a hand in them. " It is the power 
of immortal youth that thus speaks, that is 
not to be cheated. The nobler the man the 
keener the sense of the unfinished life. "And 



210 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

then something better will come," was Phil- 
lips Brooks' instinctive estimate of his own 
life. "Eternity bends over the unfinished 
life of man as the sky bends over the earth." 
And then think of the love we have that 
makes the deepest and best things of life! 
How impossible for us to forget it or think 
of it as passing away ! What Tennyson says 
of Arthur Hallam we say of our dear ones 
who have gone from our sight : 

' I loved him and love him forever. 

We believe in a loving God and so we believe 
that the sorrow of men shall be comforted 
and the severed friendships shall be knitted 
up. We know the moral worth of love, and 
we can trust the highest in the human heart 
and the highest in the universe. 

These are instincts of the soul, often dim 
and misty strivings, but whither do they lead? 
Are they not like the weeds and driftwood 
and birds of a new continent? 

" In man's self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types, 
Of a dim splendor ever on before, 
In that eternal circle life pursues." 

"Immortality," said John Fiske, "is a su- 
preme act of faith in the reasonableness of 
God's work." 



CONCERNING THE FUTUKE LIFE 211 

The argument so far is only a presumption 
in favor of belief in a future. It shows the 
belief to be natural and reasonable. It is the 
faith of the best minds and best moments of 
the race. But how shall the valleys of life 
be lighted up and the whole world flooded 
with the hope of the immortal life? How 
shall men everywhere know that they are 
born with the power of an endless life, and 
have the wider vistas and the larger measures 
of power and the higher encouragements to 
endeavor and virtue? Such a faith must be 
more than the refinement of human reason 
or the product of generations of mere human 
experience. 

Men want a surer word of prophecy. They 
want to know a life so strong and triumphant 
that they can trust that life in face- of all the 
hard and disturbing facts of the earth, a 
faith that shall not be disturbed by death 
itself. No human experience can give us the 
facts of the future life. Immortality belongs 
to the sphere of revealed religion. It is 
Christ who reveals the immortal life, "who 
hath abolished death, and hath brought life 
and immortality to light through the gospel." 

The Old Testament says little about the 
future life. That is not the purpose of its 
writers. It is the training of men to desire 



212 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

and receive the life that Christ gives. It is 
the schoolmaster training the youth of the 
race. Everywhere we see the effort to make 
God known; by law and ritual, by pain and 
blessing, by social experience and by men of 
burning lips, to lift up the thought of God, 
to purify it and spiritualize it; to make God 
known as the holy and merciful One, the One 
to be adored and obeyed and served, the God 
of nations and the God of individual life. 

There could be no true life without worthy 
thought of God ; there could be no life worthy 
of immortality unless it could partake of the 
righteousness of God. And so everywhere by 
word and by example are found the lessons 
of reverence and trust, of love and obedience. 
"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God." 

Here is the real contribution of the Old 
Testament to the doctrine of the future life, 
not in the few and scattered hints but in the 
training of the spiritual and moral life of 
men. Out of the profounder spiritual life 
rises the faith in the endless future. It is the 
life of the Psalmist rising into heaven that 
gives us the song : 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 213 

"Whom have I in heaven but thee? 

And there is none upon earth that I desire beside 

thee. 
My flesh and my heart faileth: 
But God is the strength of my heart, and 
My portion for ever." (Ps. lxxiii, 25~26.) 

It is the greatness of life in Job, the very suf- 
fering of life made a redemptive force, that 
gives the gleam of hope that lightens the 
darkness. " There is nothing in the Old Tes- 
tament more sublime," says a recent writer, 
"than the gradual unveiling of the truth of 
immortality, disclosing itself in human con- 
sciousness like the breaking of the day over 
the earth." 

Jesus Christ completes the messages of the 
Father. "But last of all he sent . . . 
his son." He tells us all we can know and 
all we need to know of a future life. 

And in all this He carries out the method 
of the prophets, the revelation of truth 
through life. "In him is life; and the life 
was the light of men. ' ' He manifests God as 
Father, and shows that the future is in- 
volved in our relation to Him. 

Christ Himself is the life and He helps 
men to the life that has no seed of corruption 
in it. "I am come that they might have life, 
and . . . have it more abundantly. ' ' He 



214 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

everywhere assumes the possibility of a 
higher life and speaks to it, awakening the 
sense of need and desire that can never be 
content with the low condition and narrow 
limits of a corruptible life. If Christ had 
never said a word about heaven, He would 
have left the hope of heaven in the heart of 
every disciple. Heaven may be a place, but 
it is first of all a life. It is called by Christ 
the life of faith. "He that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and 
whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall 
never die." "This is life eternal (the 
deathless life), that they might know thee 
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom 
thou hadst sent," To have His trust in the 
holy and loving Father, to have the desire 
in all things to do His will, to have the life 
controlled by His thoughtfulness and sym- 
pathy and love, — such a life has the seed of 
divine growth — an ever unfolding, expand- 
ing, deathless life. "I can look forward to 
old age without dread," says the hero in the 
beautiful story i i John Percyfield, " " and can 
anticipate immortality with joy, for it will 
take eternity to do all the beautiful things I 
have in mind to do." 

The final manifestation and proof of the 
future life is the resurrection of Christ. It 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 215 

is the culminating point of interest in the 
Gospel story, it is the recurring witness and 
power of the Apostolic word. We are begot- 
ten again "unto a living hope by the resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to 
an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, 
and that fadeth not away." Christ is the liv- 
ing One and He is alive for evermore. ' i He 
could not be beholden of death." And every 
friend of Christ is bound up with Him. We 
are "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with 
Christ." We are partakers of the same life. 
"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and 
it doth not yet appear what we shall be: 
but we know that when he shall appear, we 
shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
he is." How constant the emphasis of the 
New Testament that "a life in personal fel- 
lowship with Christ and nourished by Him 
is always a life eternal ; that the life of right- 
eousness, unselfishness and usefulness never 
dies, but lives with an ever-increasing full- 
ness!" 

The future life is the great, shining hope of 
the New Testament, though the emphasis is 
everywhere laid upon the present life. The 
heavenly life is the unmistakable experience 
now, and its future blessedness is the perfec- 
tion and fulfillment of the present promise. 



216 WHAT SHALL. I BELIEVE 

While Christ gives us the facts of the fu- 
ture, His silence is also most significant. A 
few things we know, enough to comfort our 
sad hearts and to quicken our eager hopes — 
and the rest, — we must leave to Him who said 
"I go to prepare a place for you." 

We know from Christ's words that it is a 
life of personal, conscious blessedness, free 
from the crippling and defeating influences 
of sin. " There shall in no wise enter into 
it anything that defileth ... or maketh 
a lie." It is a life of personal recognition 
and social fellowship, where there shall be 
no lost good, nor broken ties, nor unhappy 
isolation. The familiar, homely figures of 
the family and the Father's house tell us 
that it is no gloomy realm of disembodied 
spirits, but a life of love and fellowship and 
heart-recompense. 

It is a life of growth and of use, a limitless 
world opening to the understanding, a nobler 
service than we can now conceive engaging 
our willing spirits. Of one thing I am sure, 
it will be better than our fondest hope. It is 
implied in Him who has loved us with an 
everlasting love. "I go to prepare a place 
for you. And if I go and prepare a place 
for you, I will come again, and receive you 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 217 

unto myself; that where I am, there ye may 
be also." 

"I would not if I could," says Dr. Lyman 
Abbott, ' l stand at the open window and peer 
into the unknown beyond. I am sure that He 
whose mercies are new every morning and 
fresh every evening, who brings into every 
epoch of my life a new surprise, and wakes 
in every experience a new disclosure of His 
love, . . . has for me some future of glad 
surprise which I would not forecast if I 
could. ' ' 

" I know not what the future hath 
Of marvel or surprise, 
Assured alone that life and death 
His mercy underlies. 

* * * 

"I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I can not drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

We have no right to ignore the fact that in 
Christ 's revelation of the future life a shadow 
rests upon the lot of the wicked. God is not 
mocked. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap." There can be no such 
thing as a harvest of eternal life for a man 
who sows unto his flesh. Many a life can 



218 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

say with Helena Ritchie, in Mrs. Deland's 
powerful story, "Yes, I believe in hell, for 
that is what life is." A life that lives for 
self, whether the lower self of sensual desire, 
or the higher self of refined pleasure, regard- 
less of God or the interests of others is sure 
to have failure and self-loathing at last. No 
man can make of life a lordly pleasure-house 
without at last being "Struck through with 
pangs of hell." Christ, the Immortal Love, 
has spoken some terrible words about sin and 
penalty. And none of us would think of 
questioning their reality. It is sin that 
makes the misery of the life here, and it is 
continued sin that makes the misery of the 
life hereafter. It is the law of habit that we 
grow in the direction of continual use. To 
make Christ the ideal of life is the path of 
moral ascent: to ignore Him is the path of 
moral decline. Is punishment wholly rem- 
edial, and in another life will all men be 
brought to their right mind and turn their 
steps towards the Father's house? Do we 
trust that somehow, good 

" Will be the final goal of ill 
That not one life shall be destroyed " ? 

We must also answer — 

" Behold, we know not anything." 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 219 

Whatever hope we may cherish in our hearts, 
it would be well for us to be silent where 
Christ is silent and to have His supreme es- 
timate of a life of goodness, and His judg- 
ment upon a life of sin. I would say with 
my teacher and colleague, Dr. Beecher: 
" Jesus does not teach that there is eternal 
punishment for temporary sinning. What 
He seems to teach is that there may be end- 
less sinning, involving endless penalty." 

Certainly the doom is to live on an endless 
and worthless life. We have no right with 
true immortality unless we are willing to 
practice it. It is the Father's house and 
only the children have a rightful and joyful 
life in its many mansions. 

We should fear lest a promise being left 
us, we should fail to enter into His rest. We 
should live daily under the great motives of 
the unseen and eternal. 

The revelation of the immortal life helps us 
to a true conception of values. Life is more 
than meat, character than circumstance. It 
sheds a heavenly light upon the path of duty, 
lifting the humblest act up into its divine sig- 
nificance, and furnishing the mightiest lever- 
age for a righteous life. It brings the loftiest 
motive to bear upon achievement — giving the 
vision of faith, helping men to begin a work 



220 WHAT SHALL I BELIEVE 

for themselves and their fellow-men which the 
ages alone can finish. And from the tribula- 
tion which is the lot of every man, it brings 
the purest joy, making trials vicarious, part- 
ings but for a day, and death but the door 
into a higher life. "Who hath abolished 
death, and hath brought life and immortality 
to light through the gospel." "0 grave, 
where is thy sting? O death, where is thy 
victory? The sting of death is sin; and the 
strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to 
God, which giveth us the victory through our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved 
brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always 
abounding in the work of the Lord, foras- 
much as ye know that your labor is not in 
vain in the Lord." 



MAY 11 1908 



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